FOXBORO ? Before getting swamped by the Patriots Monday night, the Houston Texans described their game with New England as the biggest in franchise history.
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After the game, Patriots guard Logan Mankins said, ?I know the team we play next week. It?s not the biggest game in their franchise history.?
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Not by a long shot. Next up for the Patriots? The San Francisco 49ers.
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While this year?s model of the Niners is still making strides to be an elite team, the storied history of the franchise remains fresh and nowhere does that history reverberate more strongly than in New England.
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When owner Robert Kraft bought the Patriots in 1993, he made it clear the franchise he would emulate was the 49ers, the NFL?s gold standard of the 80s and 90s.
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If it isn?t ?mission accomplished,? it?s pretty close.
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The Patriots are the most successful franchise of the 2000s with five Super Bowl appearances in 12 seasons, three Super Bowl titles, a perfect regular season in 2007 and a Hall of Fame quarterback/head coach combination in Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. ?
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The Niners, with their 5-0 Super Bowl record and 16 consecutive seasons of 10-or-more wins from 1983 to 1998 are the only team New England is chasing when it comes to sustained, unstinting excellence over more than a decade. The win over Houston brought the Patriots to 10 consecutive 10-win seasons.
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In the Super Bowl Era, not even the Steelers were able to sustain the same level season after season for as long as the Niners did and the Patriots have.
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Throw in the personal.
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Tom Brady, grew up in San Mateo, California, went to the 1981 NFC Championship game where Dwight Clark made ?The Catch,? idolized Joe Montana and is now mentioned in the same breath as Montana as perhaps the greatest ever.
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Bill Belichick?s coaching idol, Paul Brown, was the man under whom Bill Walsh learned what became the West Coast offense. And Belichick?s Giant defenses banged helmets for NFC supremacy with Walsh?s Niners for a decade in the 80s.
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Contemporary linkage? The 2012 Niners executed a quarterback switch from Alex Smith to Colin Kaepernick that hearkens back just a little to the switch Belichick made from Drew Bledsoe to Tom Brady in 2001. There are some differences ? Bledsoe was the Patriots franchise hood ornament while the Niners have been gearing up to replace Smith for years; Brady proved over several games to be better than Bledsoe, while Kaepernick made his bones in practice and cameos. But the comparison mostly stands.
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Yet all that is window dressing to a game that could be ? could be ? a prelude to another meeting in New Orleans in early February.
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The Patriots are in the midst of their annual December crescendo. They?ve won seven straight games and the three blemishes on their 10-3 record came by a total of four points.
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The Niners are 5-1-1 over their last seven and are in the midst of a crushing late-season schedule that has them on the road for four out of five games.
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Both teams are the No. 2 seed in their respective conferences. Both have designs on getting home field for the playoffs. Neither can afford to stub their toe down the stretch and miss out on a first-round bye.
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?It?s a short week for us; we don?t know them very well,? Belichick said Wednesday. ?We haven?t played them in quite awhile and they?ve made a lot of changes since the last time we did play them. We really have to do a good job of trying to catch up preparation-wise this week. Hopefully we can do that, but these guys do a lot of things well.?
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Having Brady, who?s in the midst of an MVP-caliber season, helps New England make up the stagger a little bit.
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Brady said Wednesday he began working on San Francisco on Thanksgiving night after a 49-19 prime-time win over the Jets.
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Harbaugh was asked how he?d slow Brady down.
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?Well, we'd sure like to find the answer to that and then implement it,? he confessed. ?But it is really difficult. They're tough to do that against. They have a really good scheme, really good play calling, and then great individual effort at each position. The great ability that they have to play as a team. We could talk for hours about how good they are."
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The Niners, meanwhile, remain an impressive work in progress. Kaepernick?s been the anointed starter for four games. He brings a dimension to their offense that former starter Alex Smith didn?t ? the ability to threaten a defense in multiple ways and create ? but he?s an NFL embryo compared to someone like Brady.
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Context? Kaepernick?s thrown 134 passes in the NFL. Brady?s thrown 6,609. Including playoffs.
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So on Sunday night, the former gold standard will face the current gold standard. And it may not be for the last time.
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