Faced with crossroads, Patriots must choose a clear path forward

This final four-game post-bye stretch for the Patriots was critical. Even though they were 3-10 heading out to Arizona on December 14, it was imperative they show that in this foundation-laying year they’d actually, ya know, laid a foundation.

Now, three games later and with the New Year upon us, it’s obvious the franchise is still in a giant friggin’ crater with an ooze of mud at the bottom. The only sign of stability? The only pillar? The quarterback.

Saturday’s loss to the Chargers was unprofessional. The Patriots now have one meaningless game left against the Bills. For their own good, they should lose, since they’ve backslid all the way the top spot in the 2025 NFL Draft. Somehow you know it’s on the table they’ll screw that up.   

The Krafts -- who decided last year they weren’t down with Bill Belichick doing a second reset after his 2021 free-agent spending bonanza went kablooey -- now must decide if Eliot Wolf, Jerod Mayo and ALL the people around both of them can identify talent, hire it, develop it and then win games because they use it correctly.

Nothing they do inspires even a passing flutter of confidence. And that goes for ownership, too. The Krafts are very clearly out of practice in how to run the football side of their football franchise.

That reality flies in the face of the widely-held notion they’re puppet-masters, but it’s the truth.

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Bill Belichick ran the franchise. Personnel department. Draft. Scouting. Cap. Spending. Coaches. Players. Public messaging. He made the decisions and -- while the Krafts would definitely tsk-tsk and shake their heads when things went poorly -- they let him make those decisions until they decided he’d forfeited that right.

But as has become clear in the past 11 months, they literally didn’t replace Belichick. They elevated someone to coach the team. They elevated someone to run personnel. But there’s no one person leading the organization; no one person giving a coherent, concrete message and vision for what the team’s trying to do. The aim of the “collaborative” effort is to get better and lay a foundation. Even if you squint really hard, it’s hard to see the progress.

Removing Belichick from the organization was like uprooting a sequoia. Literally every aspect of the organization would feel a shock to the system. But who -- among the individuals previously in the proverbial shade -- would flourish and grow?

At the owner’s meetings in March, Robert Kraft essentially said his hope was that promising-but-stifled employees were waiting to bloom. Most everyone was willing to defer to that logic. The Krafts knew best who they had. They were closest. And who could blame them for very, very much wanting a link to the best aspects of the first 20 years of the century?

Unfortunately, they’ve wilted.

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The one person who’s been out front all season to take the slings and arrows from the media -- week after week, press conference after press conference -- has been Mayo. He’s been doing it for six months. No cavalry in the form of Wolf or ownership willing to step forward and take the heat off him even a little bit. And he’s struggled to make his points clearly, concisely and consistently.

The conversation we’ll be having this week will center around whether Drake Maye will play Sunday after the first-quarter head shot he took Saturday had him being evaluated for concussion. He had his “bell rung” (Maye’s words). He dropped the ball involuntarily because of the hit. He was shaking his head to clear cobwebs. He was cleared to play, but was putting him out for three more quarters of thrashing the right approach with the organization's most important asset?

Mayo’s Monday explanations were hard to follow. And his explanation for why Rhamondre Stevenson started after Mayo told media he’d be sitting at the outset because of his fumbling issues was non-existent.

It just feels so disorganized and rudderless.  

What’s going on is, in so many ways, reminiscent of what the Krafts did in 1997 after the Bill Parcells divorce. They had it with the consolidation of power. They pivoted to a collaborative approach with Pete Carroll as head coach, GM Bobby Grier and cap czar Andy Wasynczuk.

That team went from the Super Bowl to out of the playoffs and salary cap hell in three seasons.

This time, Mayo inherited an already-demolished roster. No Ty Law, Lawyer Milloy, Ted Johnson, Willie McGinest, Tedy Bruschi, Curtis Martin, Drew Bledsoe, Bruce Armstrong, Ben Coates, etc. for Mayo. The worst roster in the league last January quite possibly may be worse right now.

And it doesn’t stop with the players. They have two players, zero coaches and zero execs who were HIGHLY sought-after individuals before the season began.

There would have been open-market interest in Hunter Henry, Mike Onwenu and Kyle Dugger. But they aren’t top-10 players in the league at their positions. The same holds for Mayo or Wolf. Promising candidates to speak with, sure. But not layup, can’t-miss, gotta-have-him prospects when they were previously available.

Unremarkable begets unremarkable. Or worse, which is what’s happened with the wideouts.

Check out this domino effect.

Last offseason, the team hired Tyler Hughes as their wide receivers coach. Hughes was an offensive analyst at Washington last season. He hasn’t been a dedicated wide receivers coach since 2004 at Snow College in Utah, and even then he coached wideouts and tight ends.

Hughes spent the 2020-22 seasons in New England as an offensive assistant, overlapping in 2020 with Jedd Fisch, who became Washington's head coach in 2024. So, there’s a hiring link for when the Patriots were out looking for someone to coach the worst wideout room in the NFL last offseason.  

Two months later, Wolf and Co. decided Polk was worth a second-round pick. Polk played at Washington with Hughes on staff in 2023. So you can presume Polk came with the recommendation of Hughes and perhaps Fisch, who took over at Washington three months before the draft.

The Patriots long ago demonstrated they couldn’t find their bum with both hands when it came to wideouts, but now they’re relying on guys who are part of the ongoing wideout misidentification (Wolf and fellow personnel man Matt Groh) and they are nodding along when the virtues of Polk are celebrated by Fisch and Hughes.

Polk’s a mess. Probably can’t wait to go home. Probably wishes he was anywhere but here. And the Patriots are possibly out ANOTHER second-round pick. Meanwhile, the receiver sitting there at No. 34 -- Ladd McConkey -- is emasculating the defense.

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So what’s the solution? Patriots fans on Saturday voted with their voices during the blowout, chanting for the Krafts to can Mayo and hire Mike Vrabel.

That would be a the most radical move, and even then, if they stopped short of blowing out the personnel department, they’d be setting themselves up for rancor between the holdovers and the new guys.

They could hire a senior football advisor (overlord, czar, whatever) to get over the top of personnel and do a deep-dive audit. Figure out who’s good at their job, who isn’t, who can improve and who is a lost cause. Same with the scouting practices which annually yield head-scratching draft picks. They have to be able to ID what a good player is and then whether he’ll be able to succeed here in an adverse situation.

Then do the same with the coaching staff. If Alex Van Pelt isn’t the guy to wring the most out of Drake Maye, then pay through the nose to find the right offensive coordinator. Same with the positional coaches. If they are proven, outstanding coaches, they’ll be able to at least get average players to go to the right places at the right time.

Before the Patriots can get into spending all their available cap space on players and mulling what they’ll do at the top of the draft, they need to identify, court and pay for top-tier coaches. And even then, those coaches may not be willing to board a ship that’s listing this badly.

Or … the Krafts can conclude that -- despite all evidence to the contrary -- their team is on the brink of a breakthrough. They knew there’d be struggles and this is what they expected.

They can stay the course and remember the old coaching saying, “If you listen to the fans, you’ll wind up fired and sitting next to them.” Not that they’re going to wind up back in Section 213, but you get the point.

If this season was about gathering information post-Belichick, diagnosing issues and charting a course back to mediocrity, then the time for observing and data-gathering is over.

The time to decide a path and articulate it -- not some ambiguous “Trying to get better…” flim-flam -- has arrived. What’s it gonna be?