For two decade's the New England Patriots dominated the National Football League by capturing six Super Bowl titles in twenty years under the leadership of Quarterback, Tom Brady, Head Coach, Bill Belichick, and Owner Robert Kraft.
It is safe to say times have changed since the franchise's last championship in February of 2019.
Brady left for Tampa Bay in March of 2020, where eleven months, later he captured the seventh championship of his career before retiring from the NFL in March 2023.
Meanwhile, in Foxborough, things cannot have gone much worse since TB12 left.
After showing promise and taking his team to playoffs in 2021 as a rookie, the Mac Jones era in Patriot Place fell off a cliff after the Pats long-time offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels accepted the Las Vegas Raiders head coach job in 2022. Belichick decided to replace McDaniels with his former defensive assistant Matt Patricia to lead his offense before the 2022 season where the Patriots finished 8-9 and missed the post-season. 2023 was a disaster for Belichick and his Patriots as they finished 4-13 which ended up being last in the AFC with Jones’ play being a big reason why.
In Janaury of 2024, Belichick and Kraft announced they were "mutually parting ways" with each other, and the Patriots would have a new head coach for the first time in 24 years.
With Brady and Belichick gone, Kraft is the only one of the three main figureheads from the dynastic run that remains as he tries to usher in a new era of Patriots football.
There seems to be one problem however, I am not sure Robert Kraft has any idea what he is doing. Let's look at what the Patriots have done in 2024 since Belichick left town.
Kraft’s first order of business was hiring a new head coach. The Patriots did not even have a formal coaching search as a day after parting ways with the greatest coach of all time, the team announced that Jerod Mayo would be the new coach.
This didn't come as a surprise, as it had been indicated for a long time that Mayo would be Belichick's successor in New England. The issue for me here isn't that the Patriots hired Mayo. The problem is that in a coaching hiring cycle that had some of the best candidates in years with the likes of; Mike Vrabel, Jim Harbaugh, and Ben Johnson available, it is as if the Patriots had little to no interest in even hearing another perspective on how this new era should begin seems like organizational malpractice.
After hiring Mayo, Kraft then announced that Eliot Wolf would be in charge of personnel for the time being while he looked at potential GM candidates after the NFL Draft in April, where the Patriots hold the #3 Overall Pick where the team will likely choose their next face of the franchise at Quarterback.
Most people in NFL circles always say you should hire your GM before your coach as it allows the new GM to pick a coach who can be labeled as "his guy". So Kraft's plan is essentially to have an interim GM decide on his next franchise player, and then potentially replace the person who makes this pick while forcing a new GM to make do with a coach with no experience who they did not hire while also having to build a quarterback he may not believe in? That smells like a disaster to me.
Free Agency was also not a good time for the Patriots as they entered the free agent period with the most cap space in the NFL with over 100 million in cap room to bring in talent.
The team was expected to be active in the off-season as Mayo said on the day of his first press conference that the team was ready to "burn some cash".
Unfortunately, for the Patriots, the moves they have made thus far have been minimal, as all they have done was sign a bridge QB in veteran Jacoby Brissett and then resign the talent that helped them secure the number three overall pick in this year's draft. The team couldn't even out-negotiate Calvin Ridley's girlfriend in their pursuit of the veteran wideout who inked a deal with the Titans in March. As Kraft said at the owner's meetings a couple of weeks back Ridley's partner "wanted to be in the South".
Perhaps the lack of spending should not come as a surprise to Patriots fans. Despite Tom Brady taking hometown discounts throughout his twenty years with the team, it was reported in January that "Over the last 10 years, the Patriots ranked last in cash spending ($1.62 billion)", which Kraft denies.
Not to mention how Kraft's documentary on the twenty-year run titled "The Dynasty" looks like it has backfired on him as it is seen by a majority of the public as a hit piece on his former coach which Kraft also denies he had anything to do with.
Now with the NFL Draft just a few weeks away it does seem likely that the Patriots will be drafting a QB at third overall, and of all the places to go for a young quarterback prospect, New England seems like the least desirable spot to land with not much talent on offence or coaching experience to help support a young signal-caller.
Hopefully, for Patriots fans, the franchise can get back to their winning ways sooner rather than later but I cannot say I am confident about this coming to fruition, at least any time soon. Mainly because I do not believe in Kraft's vision or leadership at the moment based on the team's actions this offseason.
By: Aaron Silcoff
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