As of right now they are worse. They've had too many loses with nobody on the roster that are replaceable.
RB: Hill could be a pleasant surprise which would make the RB's better. Unless the Pats draft someone, the Pats are banking on Hill to make an impact or the RB's are significantly worse. I like Burkhead, but I don't want to see what he did last season where he and Chris Hogan jogs to the sideline, grimaces and then we don't know what the heck is going on. I think Gillisle is a good back but I don't think the Pats are using him correctly. He's not a power back like Jerome Bettis, Eddie George or LaGarrette Blount where they can out muscle their way out of poor blocking. Too many times they lined him up in obvious goaline formations where the defense just crashed the LOS and easily tackled him. I could see the frustration on Gillisle's face.
WR: How will Edelman respond from his injury? Will Chris Hogan catch a few balls and then exit the game? Will Malcolm Mitchell decide to play this year? Brandon Cooks is a really good WR but he can get bullied and taken out of a game. The Pats need the other guys to step up and help out Cooks.
TE: Worse. Dwayne Allen is awful. He gives a few good blocks when he feels like it but he's replaceable. Ebron would've been nice but wasn't banking on him to be the next Hernandez. Apparently, Ebron didn't learn his lesson from the Lions and signed with another team with a bunch of losers.
LT: Most important position on the O-line and they let Solder walk. This will be a huge loss. There's no one on the team that can step in and pick up the slack on a constant basis. Unless you're playing Madden, you can't just let guys like this walk and easily get his replacement in the draft or already on the roster.
DE: Wash. They aren't any better. You can't project Rivers will make them better when you don't even know what you have with him. Don't get me started on Clayborn. He is the Kony Ealy of last year.
LB: Biggest weakness on the team. Very odd that people on this board don't see it as teams kept throwing to their RB's out in the flat all season long and finally caught up to them in the Super Bowl. It looked like I was watching a game of Madden where you could run the same play over and over again and the computer AI can't pick up on it. Hightower coming back helps, but he is at his best when he can rush on 3rd downs. He's a very underrated pass rusher and doesn't do it often because of how bad the LB's are.
Slot CB: If they go with Rowe/Jones, they are just as bad as last year. They need someone else to compete with them.
S: I can't believe Eric Reid is still out there. Vaccaro stinks, Reid would significantly improve the safety position. He played a lot of LB last season with the 9ers. He's the guy BB has been looking for since his infatuation with Tank Williams.
RB: Agree for the most part. As an RBBC, it seems pretty solid overall to me. If the Pats get even 75% of the 2016 version of Hill (assuming he improves in pass-pro), he will have made the necessary impact.
Also, Burkhead may be a bit undervalued due to his injuries last season, which were: (1) ribs - highly unlikely to be repeated, much less a chronic issue; (2) a "knee injury" in the late season, from which he'd bounced back sufficiently by the SB to make a very solid contribution.
I'm not saying that either Hill or Burkhead will emerge to take the lead like Lewis did in 2017, but, it's an RBBC - neither of them really need to.
WR: Agree with pretty much everything. My biggest concern about WR is for 2019 and beyond. A further infusion of younger players seems necessary (though not necessarily rookies). With Edelman turning 32 in May and Hogan turning 30 in October, the trend begun with Mitchell (injury issues), Cooks (future cost issues) and Dorsett would appear to be a step in the right direction.
TE: I couldn't disagree more strongly about Allen. He was consistently excellent in both run-blocking and pass-pro (and Ebron was cut, in part, because he can do neither of those things well at all), and contributed immeasurably to the success of the Pats 2017 ground game. Even though it wasn't in evidence with the Pats in 2017, Allen was a decent receiver for the Colts (Ebron-level for a couple of seasons), so there's certainly potential that he'll contribute more in the 2018 passing game. Significant receiving contributions aren't really necessary for a guy in his role in the Pats offense, but consistently good blocking is.
In any case, the TE group isn't "worse" unless Gronk is gone.
LT: "They" didn't "
let Solder walk". They couldn't afford to keep him without bankrupting the rest of the roster significantly. Certainly OT will be an issue for awhile, but not necessarily the extreme disaster that many folks are certain it will be. In any case, given the OT situation, the very last thing to do would be to get rid of a player like Allen. In fact, it could help the offense a lot more in a lot of different ways if the Pats were to acquire a
second guy like Allen rather than a guy like Ebron.
Run-blocking and pass-pro is a team effort; it's not just on the five OL or on any one of them, individually.
DE: I also couldn't disagree more with your Clayborn-Ealy comparison. Clayborn is a far more experienced and disciplined player who has demonstrated that he can consistently set the edge against the run (something that Ealy couldn't do - or wouldn't - and an issue that dogged the Pats all season long,
and that had an indirect negative consequence on the pass rush and coverage). Also, Wise did pretty well as a rookie last season, so there's at least potential for him to improve. Eric Lee was also essentially a rookie (he'd played zero D-snaps in his two-year career before joining the Pats in week-12).
And don't discount the impact that the return of Valentine and the acquisition of Shelton (to replace the totally ineffectual 2017 version of Branch) may have on the pass rush as well as on the run-D. Pressuring the QB is a team effort; it's not just on the DE's.
LB: And one of the primary reasons that opponents were able to hurt the Pats with RB-passing was that the run-/edge-contain by the DL sucked - which left play-action passing wide open pretty much all the time. It wasn't just on the LBs - who were trying to compensate for DL run-D deficiencies.
Furthermore, the biggest weakness in the LB corps itself was a lack of bodies, and especially
experienced bodies. The LBs who ended up taking 75% of the D-snaps entered 2017 with a
combined total career NFL snaps roughly equivalent to one
average season from Hightower.
In terms of just the number of bodies, the LB corps will gain HT, Langi and Rivers (at 248 lbs, I'd project Rivers at OLB more than at DE). However, that still doesn't address the inexperience issue. Even though Van Noy and Roberts (and Marquis Flowers) now have, collectively, nearly double the D-snaps that they had at the start of last season, it seems to me that the Pats may add another veteran LB before the draft. The guy doesn't need to be a world-beater, just competent (and able to contribute more than Harris did in 2017).
Slot CB: Aside from inconsistency, the biggest issue with Rowe is staying on the field. I'm not sure how to fix that part, assuming that it's fixable. When he's healthy and on his game, Rowe can be pretty good - though mostly on the right boundary, not so much in the slot. Rowe is under contract for just one more season (and at a mere $1.1M). At worst, he should be a decent backup for Jason McCourty.
OTOH, Jon Jones consistently averaged between 35% and 40% of the D-snaps in 2017 - NOT including the 85%-95% he played while both Rowe and Gilmore were out at the same time. I think most fans don't realize that Jones played that much because his name wasn't called very often - which is a very good thing for a player in coverage. Meanwhile, Jones' $633k cap hit is so low that, when the numbers for Tobin or Waddle become official, they'll knock that cap hit out of the Top-51 that count against the cap. Jones is also an RFA at the end of 2018 and his floor is "special teams ace", so he's likely to continue to have significant value as a solid reserve, regardless.
I think that there's very likely to be competition at CB for the off-season and Camp, because there nearly always is. But I don't see slot CB as being any major issue, especially with the 3-safety nickel seeming to have become the dominant version.
S: BB's infatuation with Tank Williams (and a couple-three other similar DBs who've been on the roster in past seasons without contributing much) was mostly about trying to find/develop the next Rodney Harrison, I think.
However, the coverage game for safeties has changed quite a bit over the last few seasons. While Reid seems to be an excellent (if not elite) player whose skill set also seems to fit the Pats' current schemes, he seems likely to be almost as expensive as Devin McCourty already is (~$12M). He also wouldn't be an enormously significant upgrade over the three starting safeties the Pats have now (night-and-day over Richards, though!). And, while Reid is 26 - younger than the current average age of 29 among the Pats three starters, he doesn't necessarily improve the longer term outlook.
It seems to me that now is the time for the Pats to take another stab at drafting a high-end developmental candidate to eventually replace Chung or Devin long term (both turn 31 in Camp this season). So, maybe the
other Reid would be more appropriate (not to mention significantly cheaper). Grigsby (6001/225), who's already established himself as a very good special teamer, could also emerge as an LB/SS hybrid. Who knows?
All-in-all, a good effort by you to even attempt to break it all down, position-by position. Thanks for that.
