There will be tough competition from Jac, Pit, Ten, Cle…even Houston is much improved. If they beat Jacksonville in week 2 I will be very impressed.

We were all hanging out last night, flipping channels, and what did we land on but NFL Network’s Path to Perfection. It went through highlights of all 16 regular season games, and was pretty darn cool to watch again. That 2007 team was nothing short of phenomenal.

In my opinion, the Patriots have all the major components in place to drive the same steamroller, except for the element of surprise. The first half of 2007 was indeed steamroller-city, until we hit the first real game against the Colts. It wasn’t until the tight games against the Eagles and Ravens that had all the talking heads spouting theories and blueprints as to how to beat the Patriots, who couldn’t be stopped before the Super Bowl.

So what’s different this year? The AFC East is still weak and we’ll take the 6 wins this year. It won’t always be this easy as we all know, but for now… It’ll be no surprise this year what the duo of Brady to Moss is able to accomplish. Welker won’t be our “secret” weapon. Heck, even Faulk and Gaffney aren’t going anywhere unguarded. It still will be a matter of other teams being able to stop these players regardless of whether they already know that Moss is going deep, but this year they’re all known commodities.

A lot of teams have made major personnel changes to improve their standings, but I still don’t see any team as having improved enough to be better than the team the Patriots have in place. There is a lot of uncertainty and instability out there – especially in our division - and of course some combinations of new players, coaches, systems may hit the jackpot, but the real deal lies in New England - at least for 2008.