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One of the highlight's of the Contrarian's betting activities last year was picking the New York Giants to rain on the mega-favourite New England Patriots' parade in last year's Superbowl.

If you didn't listen then, listen now: everyone is so certain that the Patriots will bounce back from that party-silencing defeat that they can be backed at just [6.2] to go unbeaten through the regular season for a second successive year. Ignore them. There's plenty of reason to suspect that the Patriots could struggle this year, so don't be tempted by the odds of [3.0]
on them winning the AFC Conference. Here's why they won't:

It's hard to retain the AFC Championship

The New England Patriots have won the Championship four times in the last seven years but they have only once ever managed to win it in consecutive seasons. Only twice in the last 14 years has a team retained the Championship: the Denver Broncos and the Patriots themselves four years ago. However, on both of those occasions the team improved on their regular season record in the second year. The Patriots aren't capable of making an improvement because they finished the regular season last year with a perfect record.

An example

The Pittsburgh Steelers won the AFC Championship three years ago and even went on to win the Super Bowl only to have a disastrous season the year after. They won just eight of their 16 regular season games and finished third in the AFC North Division, failing to qualify for the play-offs.

History dictates that even winning the AFC East Division will be tough

It's almost unthinkable that a team who recently enjoyed a record-breaking 19-game winning streak could fall so far as to struggle to win the AFC East, but it's worth noting that no team has ever won that division on six consecutive occasions. It's been won four times in a row twice - by the Miami Dolphins and the Buffalo Bills - and has been won in five consecutive seasons by the Dolphins, but in the sixth season they really struggled, winning just eight of their sixteen games and finishing a distant third. So while it seems unlikely that the Patriots could fall from their position of being near untouchable to not even the best team in their own division, it has happened in the past.

The Super Bowl Hangover

The Super Bowl Hangover, otherwise known as the curse, is the well-supported theory that Super Bowl losers almost always underachieve the following season. In nine of the past ten seasons, the runners-up have performed worse during the next regular season and the only team who didn't get weaker - the Tennessee Titans in 2000 - didn't improve, they simply repeated their 13-3 record.

Seven of the last nine Super Bowl losers have all won fewer than 50% of their 16 regular season matches the next season. The last time a team defeated in the Super Bowl returned the next season was fifteen years ago, when the Buffalo Bills lost for the fourth year in a row.

The Indianapolis Colts will be a threat...

Taking into account points for and against, the Patriots were the only team in both the AFC and NFC to perform better during the regular season than the Indianapolis Colts, who won 13 of their 16 games. The Colts, who were the last AFC team to win the Super Bowl two years ago, came unstuck in the play-offs last year, but they are consistent - so much so that last year they became the first team ever to record 12 or more regular season victories for five straight seasons.

...as will the San Diego Chargers

Good teams to back - or at least consider - in American sports, are those who are "knocking on the door," and gathering play-off experience at the same time as strengthening their squad. The Chargers have been improving on a yearly basis and after failing to reach the play-offs in 2005, they reached the divisional play-offs in 2006 before losing out to the Patriots last year in the AFC Championship match. The next step is to win the AFC Conference, and if the Super Bowl hangover has its way with the Patriots, then the Chargers will be confident of capitalising.