Patriots know 19-0 only way to end season

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- It has certainly been a dominant decade for the New England Patriots.

Three Super Bowl championships, two coach of the year awards, and the only 16-0 regular season in NFL history. Now they're expected to keep winning throughout the playoffs, no matter how much they insist their past brilliance doesn't matter.

But if the Patriots believe that raising the Vince Lombardi Trophy is the only sign of a successful season, then they were failures the past two years.

Last January, they coughed up an 18-point lead to Indianapolis in the AFC championship game. The previous January, they didn't even make it that far. And now, a perfect record might be just a prelude to more disappointment.

"No matter how you finished the season, you've got to shoot yourself even higher to make those goals that you set at the beginning of the season," running back Kevin Faulk said.

Faulk played on all three championship teams -- and the last two that didn't make it to the Super Bowl -- and knows all about pressure.

"If you want to put that pressure on yourself, that's you," he said, "but, at the same time, we're trying to go out there and win a football game. That's it."

Already perennial contenders, the preseason hype grew with the acquisition of Randy Moss and Wes Welker to catch passes from Tom Brady, who won two Super Bowl MVP awards without them. Then the Patriots blew out their first eight opponents.

The mystery wasn't whether they'd win, but how much they'd win by.

The games got closer in the second half of the season with 4 wins by 4 points or less. But even that was viewed as more evidence of the Patriots' superiority. They don't blink when faced with adversity.

But when they do lose in the playoffs, they take it hard. There were shocked looks in the locker room after their last two eliminations. Yet, they say they're not any hungrier to go all the way because of those early exits.

"How can you bring up something like that with the season we're having and going into the playoffs? That's irrelevant. That has nothing to do with this season," cornerback Ellis Hobbs said. "You don't think about that stuff and use it as a motivation. All the motivation we need is here in this locker room and the present, 2008."

The Patriots are an insular group that isn't shaken by what goes on outside that locker room -- from the Spygate scandal to complaints that they were running up the score to feelings among fans that they're expected to raise the Lombardi Trophy again on Feb. 3 in Glendale, Ariz.

"We manage expectations within the locker room," linebacker Adalius Thomas said. "We ignore the noise and just go out there and work hard."