Tom Brady and New England Patriots Clearly Not Who They Were, So Who Are They?

With an emphatic 43-17 win over the Cincinnati Bengals, the New England Patriots defied everyone who'd declared them dead.

Instead of their season being in tatters, quarterback Tom Brady's career being over and their dynasty kaput, the Patriots are celebrating a huge win against what was the NFL's last remaining unbeaten team in 2014.

Just as Pats supporters crowed that the Week 4 Monday Night Football debacle was just one game, though, the Week 5 Sunday Night Football triumph was also just one game.

Patriots head coach Bill Belichick's mentor, Bill Parcells (who coached the Patriots to a Super Bowl himself) famously said, "You are what your record says you are."

If that's true, the Pats are 3-2, tied with the Buffalo Bills for first place in the AFC East, a half-game ahead of the Miami Dolphins and two games up on the New York Jets. Perhaps that's a good thing, but as good as the Patriots have been throughout the Brady/Belichick era?

Hardly.

An honest look at Brady's performance so far this season, the strength of the Patriots as a whole and their place in the AFC reveals a team with serious flaws, big questions and a murky playoff outlook. In the context of Brady's inarguable decline, the Patriots simply aren't the Patriots anymore.

The Dynasty

Anyone watching the Patriots over the last two seasons and thinking this is the same team that ruled the 2000s must not have watched that team.

Just look at what those Patriots accomplished:

Credit: Ty Schalter/Bleacher Report

It's been a magnificent run of dominance.

The Patriots have owned the AFC East since 2001, relinquishing the title just twice in 13 seasons (one of those two times was on a tiebreaker). They made the playoffs 10 times and missed an 11th in 2008 despite winning 11 games. They're the only team since the 2002 realignment to suffer that injustice.

Across the regular season and playoffs, they've won an incredible 74.9 percent of their games. That's so much better than the rest of the NFL it's scary. Per Pro-Football-Reference.com, the second-winningest team in that same time frame is the Indianapolis Colts, at 65.2 percent.

When we talk about the Patriots dynasty, we're talking about a team that was as good as any in football, year in, year out, for over a decade.

The 2014 Patriots are not the best.

The Reality

This edition of the Patriots is a good team, currently ranked 12th in scoring offense and 12th in scoring defense. It's outscoring opponents by an average of 3.2 points per game; per Pro-Football-Reference.com, that's a middling 14th-best in the NFL.

When we look a little deeper, though, we see a Patriots team in the second year of a steep decline. Here's how the Pats have ranked in the NFL in a variety of metrics over the Belichick/Brady era:

Credit: Ty Schalter/Bleacher Report

Scoring offense and defense are on this chart, in blue and red.

So is the Simple Ranking System, a way of mathematically comparing results, strength of schedule and strength of victory to rank a team's overall strength against the rest of the league. It's simple, but it's strong; it's one of the most accurately predictive metrics.

Pro Football Focus (subscription required) has whole-team grades for every phase of the game; I've included the overall offensive and defensive grades from every year the site has graded. Think of these grades as a subjective assessment of quality based on film review—how good the team looks.

Football Outsiders' DVOA is the most complete, most rigorous one-number statistic for overall team effectiveness; there's a detailed explanation on the Football Outsiders site.

The graph tells the story: The Patriots have consistently been one of the very strongest teams in football. They've been No. 1 in DVOA in six of the 13 measured seasons. They've hovered in the top five of all the other metrics nearly from wire to wire.

Save for small across-the-board dips in 2005 and 2008, and defensive rankings slipping into the 10th-15th range for much of the last five years, the Patriots have put together an unbroken run of dominance in every area.

"We just didn’t do a good enough job really in any area," Belichick said on a conference call in the wake of the Chiefs loss, per Christopher Price of WEEI. "[There was] no consistency offensively, didn’t do a good job defensively against the running game, didn’t convert on third down, in the red area. Offensively we weren’t good on third down."

That kind of performance has been the rule for the Patriots in 2014, not the exception. Their numbers have fallen off a cliff. None of the metrics rank them in the top 10, let alone the top five.

In points scored, the Pats were in the top three for four straight seasons and are now 12th. After three straight years in the top three, PFF graded the Patriots offense as its 13th-best in 2013. The Pats currently sit at 26th. Their DVOA ranking was No. 3 overall at the end of last season; currently it's No. 23.

Not A Disaster, Not a Diamond

After the Patriots' blowout of the Bengals, many Bleacher Report readers chortled at my folly, having already declared the death of the Patriots dynasty.

Jim Rogash/Getty Images

That was certainly a huge win, and it reaffirmed the quality of New England's coaching staff and leadership. With the personnel the Patriots have on the field, though, they're not going to be one of the league's best teams when this season's in the books.

As Doug Kyed of NESN.com pointed out in his film review of the Bengals win, "The Patriots lacked a consistent pass rush, were shaky in their run defense, struggled in the red zone offensively, committed too many penalties and allowed three big plays through the air." A lot of questions were answered, but quite a few remain.

Brady's mental decline is debatable, but his physical decline isn't; he can't throw downfield or to the sideline like he used to. It shows in his production. Football Outsiders' DYAR statistic ranks Brady as their 25th-most effective quarterback of 2014, in the not-so-prestigious company of Ryan Fitzpatrick and Jake Locker.

The Patriots' desperate search for receiving playmakers has been well-documented. Outside of tight end Rob Gronkowski, the Patriots just don't have a player who can take the top off a defense or scare defensive coordinators into respecting Brady's deep ball. The running back committee has averaged an unremarkable four yards per carry.

The defense isn't significantly worse than it's been in the last few seasons, but the offense is worlds away from its usual standard—and they don't have the personnel to get much better. The Patriots are who they are, a decent team. 

More than likely, they'll spend the season battling the Bills and Dolphins for the division title—and it wouldn't be surprising if the AFC East doesn't get any wild-card berths. Even the Pats make the postseason, it's hard to see them standing toe-to-toe with the league's best and coming out on top.

The real question isn't whether Tom Brady's still an elite quarterback or whether the Patriots are still an elite team. It's whether Belichick will try and reload around Brady for 2015, or as ESPN's Chris Mortensen reported, they might rebuild around Jimmy Garappolo.