Newton wasn’t the QB then. Stidham was, who is like 5X worse than Newton. The clear narrative was the Patriots thought they could compete with Stidham, hence they re-signed Thuney, McCourty, Slater, and others who were veterans, and they actually increased Gilmore’s salary in 2020 in order to keep him. They were 100% trying to compete for a championship again in 2020. They upgraded later to Newton after getting him for dirt cheap because he couldn’t visit teams due to Covid.
All of the the Bill cheerleaders in the media like Lombardi and others thought the system would prove superior to any player, and after week 1, there were a lot of victory laps.
The idea now that 2020 was a “reset” year is utter bunk. You don’t do a reset year by signing all your aging vets and declining to trade anyone for draft picks. The change of narrative came when Bill told the press that the 2020 failures were due to being “broke” and having no money to sign anyone. Then the revisionism started with some crazy reverse engineering that the cap precluded them from signing Brady (it didn’t) and that 2020 was a rebuild year (it wasn’t) and that it was all because of a brilliant master plan to save money and then blow their load on these 2021 off-season signings.
That’s the way it actually went down. If you go back into the history of the threads on here, you’ll see my version is accurate and not revised by hindsight.