Massachusetts mystique? Fins have nothing to fear
Brian Flores, Ryan Fitzpatrick and the Dolphins travel to Gillette Stadium to face a diminished New England Patriots team playing without quarterback Tom Brady and other stars.
Psssst:
Keep this quiet, but …
The Patriots have lost their mighty homefield advantage.
And the 2019 Dolphins, of all teams, are the ones who broke the spell.
After a decade of complete domination at home, Bill Belichick’s Patriots ended the Tom Brady era with losses in three of their past four games at Gillette Stadium.
Brady’s final pass in a New England uniform? A gamesealing pick-six against the Titans in January.
Now, two of the Patriots’ three late-season home losses came to teams that reached the AFC Championship Game (the Titans and the Chiefs). So while those results were out of character for Belichick’s bunch, they were at least understandable.
There’s no excusing or understanding, however, the Patriots losing to the Dolphins, who at plus-17 pulled off one of the biggest upsets in league history with a 27-24 victory on Dec. 29, 2019.
The rematch is Sunday as the 2020 regular season gets under away. But while the Patriots and Dolphins will meet on the same field, it’s a totally different stadium.
An empty stadium. A quiet stadium. And potentially a neutral stadium.
While the Dolphins will welcome some 13,000 fans inside Hard Rock Stadium for their Sept. 20 home opener, Massachusetts officials have prohibited the Patriots from opening their gates through at
least September.
“I don’t know how it’s going to be,” said Dolphins offensive lineman Jesse Davis. “I think it’s going to be kind of either a dead feeling or it’ll just kind of feel like practice. I don’t know. It’s going to be interesting to say the least.”
Interesting — and potentially advantageous to the Dolphins, who have lost 15 of 18 games at Gillette since it opened in 2002.
But it’s not just the Dolphins who have left Foxborough with an L. Most everyone has.
In the 2010s, the Patriots were a ridiculous 69-11 at home during the regular season and never trailed in 43 of those 69 wins. An even more absurd stat:
Tom Brady as a Patriot went 95-0 at home when leading going into the fourth quarter.
There’s more.
The Patriots haven’t lost three home games in a season since 2008 — which, not coincidentally, is the last time they didn’t win the AFC East (the Dolphins were division champs that year). Their home winning percentage the last decade was some 30 points higher than the league average. Simply astounding.
But this isn’t your father’s New England Patriots. It’s not even your older brother’s.
Brady and Rob Gronkowski are in Tampa Bay. Five starters from last year’s top-ranked defense are gone.
Among the recently departed: Kyle Van Noy, who signed a big-money contract with the Dolphins in the offseason.
“I think it’s going to be a good atmosphere because at the end of the day, you’re going to find out it’s the team versus the team,” Van Noy said. “There’s no real homefield advantage. Obviously, you have to make the road trip out there, but you’re basically going against that team and they’re going against you. You’ve just got to outperform [them], so I think that’s pretty cool.”
Added defensive tackle Davon Godchaux: “There is no home-field advantage. We know we’re in New England, realistically; but at the end of the day, there are no fans. … Those fans make a big difference, but at the end of the day, who wants it more is the team that’s going to win the game.”
A quick correction: the idea that playing at home brings no advantages is wrong. The Dolphins still need to make the threehour flight to New England, will still sleep in an unfamiliar hotel and will still dress in a different locker room.
Plus, there is some evidence that crowd noise is an overblown factor when it comes to homefield advantage, at least in baseball.
Major League Baseball has played its season in front of empty stadiums and home teams have won games exactly at the same rate (53.7 percent) as they have since the league was integrated more than 70 years ago.
Still, football is a more emotional, adrenalinefueled sport, and historically, home NFL teams have won more often than home MLB teams by as much as 5 percent.
The Patriots will try to recreate some of that juice by pumping in crowd noise, but the league has capped the permitted artificial volume at 70 decibels — roughly the same level as a vacuum cleaner.
“Does it affect our preparation?” Flores asked rhetorically lately. “We’ll go about it as if there is a situation where we may need to go to a silent count or hand signals. If we we need it, we’ll go to it. If we don’t need it, we won’t.
“But, yeah, the preparation is a little different in that in some cases, you know there is going to be crowd noise and you know it’s going to be loud. In this situation, I think we’re going into it with the assumption that it will be — whatever decibel levels it can get up to, it will be loud enough that we will have to make hand signals or silent count or things of that nature. That’s how we’ll prepare for it.
“It will be different; it will be unique,” he continued. “I don’t think any of us have been in a situation like this in an NFL game. There is going to be a little bit of a learning curve here as well.”