Hello and welcome to the Sea Hawkers podcast.

I'm your host, Brandon Schultz, and today I am joined by my good buddy, Adam Emmert,

as we are bringing on a special guest today, Adam.

Heck yeah, man.

As we get into Super Bowl week here and things start to ramp up, we want to know a little bit more about this Patriot team that we're facing this upcoming weekend. Are they a paper tiger? Are they somebody to take seriously? I mean, there's a lot to get into with all that, Brandon. And I think you found the perfect person to do it, man. Yeah, we're bringing on one of our favorites. E.J. Snyder of bootleg football. He covers the NFL throughout the season. You probably know him because he's been on the show so many times at football, E.J. Out on X. And man, oh, man, E.J., you guys over at bootleg football have been putting in the work this year.

Yeah, a little bit, a little bit.

But we are plenty of familiar with both of these teams.

Me, more so because I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I get to guest on great podcasts like this one or another.

So I talk about the Seahawks quite a bit.

But the rise of the Patriots was something we thought was possible

and I think exceeded our expectations. So we've been watching that team since our summer series,

and they've hit most of the green lights. They've been even better than we thought they could be

under Mike Brable in the first year. Okay. Where do you come out on this, E.J., because I do feel like there is a segment of controversy

going into the Super Bowl of, are these Patriots legit?

Or have they just had a super easy schedule?

And they've been the product of a whole lot of luck down the stretch. I don't buy that. They have definitely had an easy schedule. They didn't get to pick it just like any other team. And at the beginning of the year, you probably would have looked at their schedule and said, I don't think it's that easy, but that's the funny thing about schedules. They look very different at the end of the year than they do at the beginning of the year.

Have they benefited from that?

For sure.

You can't look at the record of everybody they've played and say that they haven't, but does that take away from how well they're playing football, how far they've progressed from where they started, even from where they were a year ago before they made the regime change.

No, it does it.

They have made some tremendous choices, just like the Hawks.

People had very similar questions about all the changes the Hawks were going through in the summer.

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