FOXBORO, Mass. – Is it time to take an unswerving look at what the next four months might bring for the New England Patriots?

Are you sure? Because it may be as pleasant as an embolism.

The Patriots are in a very bad way.

And it’s not because of the 31-0 loss to the Bills on Sunday. Good teams get their faces ripped off sometimes. And the Bills were plainly in a face-ripping mood, so the result is (somewhat) explicable.

The state of the Patriots right now has little to do with the game anymore. Or even the man at the center of the controversy, Lawyer Milloy. It has to do with the relationship between Bill Belichick and the team he’s assembled.

Belichick weakened his team five days before the season began and his players know he didn’t have to. Belichick may not have wanted to do what was financially necessary to keep Milloy. He may have felt that working Milloy’s salary under the 2003 salary cap was not a shrewd long-term move. But the players are playing for this year. And when Milloy was let go, it was past the point where any year other than 2003 mattered.

If you told the Patriots last Monday that Belichick would either A) sing the anthem at the opener or, B) put his team’s prospects of winning its season opener in harm’s way, they’d have gotten busy buying earplugs.

There’s no way Belichick would jeopardize a season with the business bottom line. Not in September.

But he did. And now Belichick is arguably in the most difficult phase of a coaching career that’s had a few tough ones.

Even if you’ve proved you can bring a team through rudderless days when the franchise quarterback is in the hospital with a severed vein deep in his chest. Even if you’ve guided a team through the trauma of having a loved and respected coach pass away during training camp, nothing compares to what he’s in now. Because the damage done was self-inflicted.

The Patriots did everything right in the offseason with their signings and their draft. The major players were on board for workouts and mini-camps from the start. Training camp went well, without major injury. The Pats went unbeaten in the preseason and appeared to have plugged the holes that needed repair by the time 2002 ended.

Then Belichick blew it all up five days before the opener. For what? The coach who quite likely did the best job in football history of managing a team in disarray just plunged a perfectly good team into disarray.

The hard part for Belichick is he probably knows it. Despite his protestations to the contrary, the uncertainty of his defense on Sunday and the intensity and aggressiveness of the Bills’ defense was traceable to what happened Tuesday with Milloy.

At every practice, and especially at every game, players suspend their instinct to do what is good for themselves. Running as hard as you can into men who are running as hard as they can into you is not natural. To get yourself into a state of mind to do that, you have to believe in the greater good of doing it. You have to sell yourself on that notion. To do that you have to commit yourself to your team and your coach and unwaveringly believe the commitment is reciprocal so that the entire team can succeed in attaining the one goal – winning.

This week, was winning the only thing on the mind of everyone involved with the New England Patriots? Did releasing Lawyer Milloy help the 2003 Patriots at all? No and no. Not on any level.

It will be hard for Bill Belichick to get a team that appeared to be very good to move past that and attain its potential. Damage has been done. And it may be irreparable. And you ask yourself, “Is this when it starts to go bad?”