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How did they come to be located in Foxboro, halfway between Boston MA and Providence RI? Foxboro looks to be 30 to 40 miles from downtown Boston. Is it considered a suburb of Boston? Are the Patriots considered a Boston team? Why is the team called the "New England" (versus "Boston" or "Foxboro") Patriots?

Excellent questions!

From 1959 to 1970, the team was known as The Boston Patriots and they played their games at Fenway Park and sometimes at a college field. The name of the college escapes me but it might have been BC.

The owner of the team at this time was Billy Sullivan who basically had no business owning a team. To be kind, let's just say he didn't have very deep pockets. Well the Patriots needed to have a stadium of their own and Billy didn't have the money to build a stadium in Boston proper, so he built a "handyman's special" out in Foxboro where the family also had a horse racing track. It costed $6.2 million back in 1970 to build that stadium and it took less than a year. Just for perspective, the Patriots this year paid back-up quarterback Drew Bledsoe twice as much as what that stadium costed to build!

That same year, the team's name was changed from the Boston Patriots to the New England Patriots. I think Sullivan really wanted to expand his fan base from Maine to Connecticut and thus have a market nearly as big as New York.

This stadium, originally named Schaefer Stadium, was a dump right from the beginning. Before the first game, the toilets stopped working and the spectators were told to go pee in a corner of the bathroom while stadium workers were there mopping it up. I'm not kidding!

I have been to this stadium and I can tell you that hands down, this is the worst professional football stadium in America. Most of the seats are benches with numbers (for seats) stenciled on them, there are not (even today) enough bathrooms, the parking lot was never paved properly and is perpetually a mud bowl, and traffic to and from is a four-hour snarl as you must drive several miles in bumber to bumper gridlock in order to reach the nearest highway.

New owner Bob Kraft tried to build the new stadium in Boston but was rejected at every turn. He almost managed to get one built in South Boston but the residents petitioned and got it stopped. They didn't want to deal with game-day traffic, unruly fans, etc. (The real story is that the local pols didn't get enough "grease".)

So the new stadium, now getting the finishing touches, is being built right behind the old stadium, where the now defunct race track used to be. All I have heard about this new stadium is that it is going to be state-of-the-art and arguably the best stadium in America. Well I will go to a game next year and let you all know if the truth matches the hype. Long-suffering football fans in New England deserve a real stadium.