The best team in the NFL over the last decade won nothing in 2008-2009. The New England Patriots, Winners of three Super Bowls since the year 2000, didnt even win the AFC East Division this past year. They finished second behind surprising Miami.

Naturally, they had excuses. The Patriots all-world, all-star, super-stud quarterback Tom Brady went down in the first game played for real in September , a knee injury knocked him out of action for the entire season. That was a huge blow. Brady, once a sixth-round draft pick, had long ago cemented his legacy as a Hall of Fame caliber quarterback who had led New England to three Super Bowl victories.

Very few quarterbacks in the entire history of the NFL can make that claim. So when Brady went down for the season, it was, clearly, a big blow to the Patriots. But New England has great management and a brilliant Head Coach, Bill Belichick.

As the team once did in finding Brady in a low round of the draft, it repeated with a quarterback they drafted out of USC, a guy who never played a down in college and, in fact, had not taken a snap since High School. This diamond in the rough is, of course, Matt Cassell.

It took a few games, and lots of cautious play, but eventually Cassell, like Brady before him, started to shine , and the Patriots started to win, just about every week. They were running out of games … it was going to be difficult, maybe impossible, to catch the Dolphins, but, if they didn’t, no one would be able to lay the blame at the feet of Cassell. He played brilliantly.

In fact, Cassell was such a revelation that the Patriots, with the knowledge that Brady was coming back healthy, were able to trade Cassell to Kansas City in the off-season for a high second round draft pick. It’s an amazing story. In fact, screenwriters in Hollywood couldn’t create a movie plot any more spectacular than what happened to Cassell in 2008-2009. It actually reads like fiction, but it really happened.

But the Cassell story is now “ancient history” and a new chapter is ready to unfold for the Patriots. There are lots of questions surrounding this team. Is Brady really fully recovered? Will he be the same amazing QB he was before the injury? Has Belichick revamped the team’s aging defense enough to keep them competitive in 2009-2010? Is the team still as talented as it was when winning all of those Super Bowls? And, perhaps most importantly, have the Bills, Dolphins and Jets - the other teams in the AFC East - finally caught up to the mighty Patriots? That’s a lot of questions swirling around one team.