The New England Patriots have been driven by the Bill Belichick and Tom Brady train for more than a decade, with several Super Bowl wins to show for it. Now they enter the 2015 season as defending champions once again, and while they have a strong shot at repeating, there are a number of reasons why this could be the dynasty’s last hurrah for awhile.

Let’s forget DeflateGate for the moment, which will cost the Patriots a draft pick at most. The more vital concern in 2015 is whether Tom Brady can have another career year, which was a necessity in 2014 to lift the team above its own various roster deficiencies. That was most evident in the first few weeks of the season, when Brady wasn’t at his best, and the team stunk because of it. Once he was able to turn it on, New England instantly became the AFC favorite.

But Tom Brady isn’t getting any younger, and while he’s heard that and shrugged it off before, he’ll enter the 2016 season at the age of thirty-nine. Even if he continues playing, his body will have begun breaking down significantly, as all quarterbacks do by that age. That means 2015 could be his last hurrah; if he wins a second consecutive Super Bowl, he might well retire and go out on top. In such case Bill Belichick will be left to rebuild around young Jimmy Garoppolo, and while he may end up being the real thing, the championship window will close for at least a little bit while he finds his footing. That makes 2015 a particularly crucial season for the New England Patriots all around.

The New England Patriots are in full on damage control mode, and they may be shifting the blame to each other. Head coach Bill Belichick held a press conference today in which he claimed he had no knowledge of the allegedly under-inflated footballs with were used in the AFC Championship game, and all but said “You’ll have to ask Tom Brady about that.” Are we to believe that the smartest and most anal-retentive coach in the game has no knowledge of the balls his team uses, or is he simply trying to throw Brady under the bus?

Tom Brady, for his part, held his own press conference later in th day in which he stated that he didn’t have the balls altered in any way and also had no knowledge about the situation. But as the New England Patriots head into the Super Bowl and should be answering questions about how they thoroughly dominated the AFC this season, instead we’re left to decipher what their non-answers regarding the cheating allegations really mean.

Surely, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady got together and discussed their media strategy before each taking the podium. But it still sounded like Belichick was suggesting that it was Brady’s responsibility to answer for the altered balls. Is this a coordinated approach by the two men aimed at shifting the blame around all week in the hopes it’ll die down by the time the Super Bowl kicks off? Or are the cracks in the decade long bulletproof Belichick-Brady tandem finally starting to show?

Someone’s head within the New England Patriots organization will roll this offseason. It won’t be the head coach or the quarterback, but neither helped their case today by playing dumber than the entire football world knows they are. Meanwhile the NFL itself remains silent about any discipline.