After respectable NFL Draft, can Patriots' brain trust be trusted again?

New York Times

28-04-2025

You've probably already heard the chatter: The New England Patriots could be a playoff team in 2025.
Woah. The Pats haven't been to the playoffs since the 2021 season. And that was a best-forgotten 47-17 wild-card loss to the Buffalo Bills, whose domination was such on that bone-chilling night at Highmark Stadium that they scored a touchdown on every one of their seven drives. In other words, if you're the type who likes to croon about the so-called Patriot Way, you have to go way back to Feb. 3, 2019, and New England's 13-3 victory over the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl LIII.
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But while forecasting a possible 2025 playoff run is too much hoo-hah too soon, there's a much better way to talk in upbeat terms about the Patriots without sounding like you're laying the groundwork for a tryout for the team's cheerleading squad. It's called trust. Put in the form of a simple question, do you trust that New England's newly assembled football operations department has the team pointed in the right direction?
This isn't about grading their selections in the 2025 draft, though it's worth noting that a lot of people believe the Patriots did a pretty good job shopping for the latest groceries. As The Athletic's Chad Graff wrote, 'They entered with a bunch of holes. They leave with a respectable roster and newfound explosiveness on offense to go with a pair of highly drafted linemen to protect quarterback Drake Maye.' And in his ranking of the draft classes from 1 to 32, The Athletic's Dane Brugler has the Patriots atop the list.
Sure. If you're going to rebuild around your quarterback, it's a good idea to bring in some players who hopefully will keep Maye from needing to get his knee rebuilt. The Pats selected LSU offensive tackle Will Campbell with the No. 4 pick and then went the weapons route in the next two rounds with running back TreVeyon Henderson of Ohio State and wide receiver Kyle Williams of Washington State.
Much has been said and written about the pre-draft interview the Patriots did with Campbell in Baton Rouge, La., and how 49-year-old, first-year coach Mike Vrabel, wanting to 'feel' Campbell, climbed into a blocking pad to do an on-field test drive. Campbell dropped Vrabel, who felt that showed him something, and next thing you know Campbell was wearing a Patriots ball cap on the big draft night stage in Green Bay, Wis. But I'm less interested in Vrabel getting dropped by Campbell and more interested in Patriots executive vice president of player personnel Eliot Wolf dropping in on Campbell last fall. We can glean two important takeaways from that:
• Campbell has been on the Pats' radar for a long time.
• While Vrabel had the final word on how the Pats would use their No. 4 pick in the draft, he didn't summarily throw out whatever scouting was being done and data that was being mined before his being named coach.
The new crew. pic.twitter.com/1GJhq9mp2u
— New England Patriots (@Patriots) April 26, 2025
For those looking for signs that the Patriots remain mired in organizational chaos, the 2025 NFL Draft is a good sign that they're not.
True, it would have been next to impossible to discern suspected organizational chaos just by watching the draft on television, unless, say, the NFL Network showed a cutaway shot of Vrabel lifting Wolf off the floor by the shirt collar. But the sense is that the Pats are mostly on the same page. I use the word 'mostly' here, given something Wolf said Friday night about a disagreement involving the Pats' decision to select Henderson at No. 38.
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After Wolf went for the cheap laugh — 'The hardest decision tonight was what to eat' — he got down to cases.
'There was a little bit of a debate about who we were going to pick, and ultimately, one of the players we were talking about got drafted,' Wolf said. 'So it didn't end up mattering, but I think it was a really good step in the right direction just for us working together in our relationship as co-workers, because we have to have productive disagreements for this to work. We can't just agree on everything; we can't just acquiesce to each other on something, so I think it was really productive from that standpoint.'
Ryan Cowden, the new vice president of player personnel who was working in the front office of the Tennessee Titans when Vrabel was their head coach, said, 'I think the point (Wolf) was making before the pick was really about one of those moments where there was a time element involved, right? The clock's ticking. There's some discussions. There's a couple of players that involve opinions from both sides.
'I think it's a healthy thing,' Cowden said. 'I think in the end, what that does is it allows us to come to a consensus after listening to each other's opinions and understanding that you respect where those come from because of the work that's been put in by each of those individuals.'
If some of this seems a wee bit performative, so what? It beats furrowed brows and pulled curtains. Besides, it's not so much the organization that's been on display by the Patriots these past two weeks, but the lack of disorganization. Seems like only yesterday that former coach Bill Belichick committed one of the biggest blunders of his mostly brilliant New England tenure, which was to hand over the offense to Matt Patricia and Joe Judge, two people with next to no experience on that side of the ball.
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And while there were a lot of people (hello there, me!) who last year saluted the decision to hire Jerod Mayo as head coach, the missteps began almost immediately.
The 2025 Patriots haven't played any games yet. They haven't even had a meeting. So all bets are off, figuratively and literally.
For now, though, the New England Patriots organization looks, well, organized.
(Photo of Mike Vrabel, left, and owner Robert Kraft: Winslow Townson / Imagn Images)