Steve Silverman

With the halfway point of the regular season just a week away, the three-time Super Bowl champion Patriots are steamrolling as no other team has done before. Not only are they winning every week, but they are doing it with the knowledge that they are chasing history and glad to be doing it.

Led by the formidable duo of Tom Brady and Randy Moss, the Patriots finally have the offensive firepower to dominate a game, much like their defense has done since the start of their Super Bowl era in the 2001 season.

It has just been so easy. They have not scored less than 34 points in any game this season. They scored 48 in Week 6 at Dallas and 49 at Miami, including 42 in a torture session of a first half. Nobody is going to say that Bill Belichick is a nice guy, but if he had kept pressing in the second half the Pats could have reached the 60- or 70-point level.

Nobody expected the Dolphins to be the team that derailed the New England express, but playing in Miami has been a painful experience for the Patriots throughout their history and never more so than in the first two months of the season. Prior to the 49-28 win over the Dolphins Sunday, the Patriots had been 1-13 in September and October road games against the Dolphins.

Will the Patriots become the first team to win 16 games in the regular season? On pace for 638 points this season (nearly 40 a game), can they shatter the points scored record of 556 held by the 1998 Vikings? Wil they maintain their current pace to surpass records like point differential (19.8 ppg, by the 1962 Packers), touchdown passes (51, by the 2004 Colts) and touchdowns (70, by the 1984 Dolphins)?

Perhaps they will go for the spot in the history books. No NFL team will ever admit wanting anything more than a Super Bowl title, but the Patriots are playing with a certain ferocity that speaks volumes. No matter what they say for the record, they are looking to separate themselves from the NFL’s all-time great teams. Their competition comes from Vince Lombardi’s Packers of the 1960's, Don Shula’s Dolphins and Chuck Noll’s Steelers of the ‘70’s and Bill Walsh’s 49ers of the ‘80’s.

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But if the Patriots do stumble, where are the potential roadblocks?

The first is an obvious one, the Nov. 4 game at Indianapolis with the defending Super Bowl champion Colts. Going into their Monday night game at Jacksonville, the Colts are also undefeated. Tony Dungy will be able to play the no-respect card as his team prepares for that game. “Even though we are the defending Super Bowl champions, we’re undefeated and we’re playing at home, all anyone talks about is how good they are,” Dungy will be able to say. “Show the world who the best team is.”

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The experts in Las Vegas are likely to have the Colts as 1-point favorites if both teams go into the showdown undefeated. 

The Colts are more responsible than anyone else for the Patriots’ explosiveness this year. Belichick, you will remember, forced Brady to play last season without a representative wide receiver crew. He traded away Deion Branch, his only legitimate wideout, last September and Brady had nothing but retreads and tight end Benjamin Watson as his targets. They still made it to the AFC championship game and  had a 21-6 halftime lead before Peyton Manning found the answer and riddled the secondary in the second half.

Belichick and personnel guru Scott Pioli got the message after that 38-34 defeat. They brought in Moss, Donte Stallworth and Wes Welker to rejuvenate the WR crew and that group has played beyond expectations through the first seven games. Moss, of course, resembles the player who was an unstoppable force in his first three years in the league with the Vikings. Look for this unit to be at its best when the Pats go to the RCA Dome.