Just days after being hired, New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel made it clear what he was hoping to achieve in his first season.
He wants a tough, physical football team, and one that is especially good up front when it comes to running the football.
On Tuesday, the signing of free agent center Garrett Bradbury ended up giving them just that.
His addition now gives New England an incredibly physical interior offensive line. While Bradbury isn’t necessarily known for his pass-blocking skills, PFF had him rated in the top half of players at his position with a 70.7 run-blocking grade.
That means that when it comes to pushing opposing defensive lines around, they’ve definitely got someone who can help them do that.
“How skilled are we up front, how physical we are up front?” said Vrabel during an interview with WEEI in January. “But there’s still something to being able to run the football when you have to in short yardage situations around the goal line, to be able to control the pace of the game late in the game.”
“When you play with the lead, these games, every year, they get closer and closer, just as how the league wants it, right? So everybody watches till the end of the game, and hopefully, everybody has a shot, and how critical we can execute in the four-minute, two-minute situations.”
“There is going to be an element that our physicality is going to have to play in, and running the football is going to be part of it, but it won’t be the entire thing we do.”
David Andrews was certainly one of the tougher guys in the ground game, with the former undrafted free agent coming in as a player who had a nasty edge about him, which helped see him become one of the leaders among that group.
His recent release certainly left some question marks, especially when it came to how they might deal with his absence. Both Cole Strange and Jake Andrews were thought to be candidates, but the former veteran certainly set a high bar for his replacement.
Based on who they have right now, they’ve got a pretty tough group. If the season started tomorrow, the interior of New England’s offensive line would essentially see Cole Strange at left guard, Bradbury at center, and Mike Onwenu at right guard. During his absence in 2023, the Patriots certainly didn’t run the football as well while Strange was sidelined, and they were inconsistent there again last season after he missed the majority of 2024.
The last time both Strange and Onwenu were healthy alongside Andrews in 2022, both Rhamondre Stevenson and Damien Harris combined for over 1500 yards rushing, with Stevenson finishing that season with 1,040 rushing yards. The two also combined for eight touchdowns.
That’s the type of football Vrabel said we can expect to see from his football team. For now, Bradbury’s addition has certainly given them the right kind of player. Now the hope is that they’ll establish themselves as a team that may not be the most talented, but one that opponents will hopefully have a tough time dealing with in 2025.
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Ian Logue is a Seacoast native and owner and senior writer for PatsFans.com, an independent media site covering the New England Patriots and has been running this site in one form or another since 1997.
