There are two things I’m nearly certain of when it comes to the New England Patriots.

First: If they were ever deflating footballs, or otherwise engaging in putrid malfeasance, they are no longer.

Second: They may absolutely, as they did eight years ago, annihilate the rest of the league all season. No, they won’t go undefeated, but it could still be ugly for the rest of the NFL. It could be Godzilla-ish with other franchises serving as small neighborhoods in Tokyo.

They put up fiddy against Jacksonville on Sunday and this is what the Patriots haters will say: It’s only the Jaguars. Everyone smashes them. Or: The Patriots beat the Steelers earlier this season minus two of Pittsburgh’s best players. They beat the Bills because Rex Ryan always runs his mouth but hasn’t won anything substantial in years.

Sure, I get that. The Patriots are not perfect. They have holes.

But they have Tom Brady and Bill Belichick and hate. They have pure, pure hate.

The team is fueled by Deflategate. They are furious. They will never admit this, but they are. On the outside, they are robots. On the inside, they are nuclear fission.

You saw a window underneath their manicured exteriors with something Jonathan Kraft said Sunday in his weekly pregame appearance on 98.5 The Sports Hub, the team’s flagship station. When asked about the Ravens being 0-2 (now 0-3), Kraft said: “It’s too bad about Baltimore, isn’t it? It’s really too bad about Baltimore.”

It was the Ravens who complained the Patriots were using illegal formations in the playoff game against them last season (they were legal). Asked if it was karma, Kraft said, tongue-in-cheek: “Oh, that has nothing to do with it. The Ravens are sweethearts. John Harbaugh, he’s a sweetheart.”

Then, just hours after that, they blistered the Jaguars, 51-17. Yeah, it was only the Jaguars, but look so far at what New England has done. It beat Pittsburgh, 28-21. It traveled to Buffalo and put 40 on the Bills and then a 50 burger on Jacksonville.

This is the eighth time the Patriots have scored 50 or more in the Brady and Belichick era. The Elias Sports Bureau says this is the 31st time Brady has scored at least 40. And Brady became just the fourth quarterback in history to have 400 career touchdowns.

But this season for New England is about more than statistics. This is about a form of aggression we’ve rarely seen in the NFL. In fact, the last time we saw it was, well, the Patriots in 2007, when they went 16-0 in the regular season.

That remarkable season came after Spygate. Twelve times in that regular season they scored at least 30 points, including four times over 40 and twice over 50.

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SOURCE: Bleacher Report, Mike