Patriots News 4-06, Milton Trade QB Room Dynamic?
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Good morning. Here are your Patriots news 4-06 and notes for this week. We’ll discuss the Joe Milton trade below, but first, the Patriots Hall of Fame committee met on Thursday to discuss a lengthy list of good candidates.
Patriots.com’s Paul Perillo wrote a terrific article about Bill Parcells last week, and another one this week, where he wrote about the logjam of deserving players from the Pats’ dynasty years and why he selected the three players he did.
We also emailed each other on the subject, as I was curious about players and coaches who are not from the dynasty era. I get that so many players deserve recognition from the Brady-Belichick years, that players from earlier eras are being pushed farther and farther back.
Part of the Patriots HOF Nominating Committee is a Senior Committee, consisting of the 10 most senior members of the selection committee. They gather to consider any player who has been retired for 25 or more years and who has also been a previous finalist but has not been selected by fan voting. I think it is time for the Senior Committee to meet.
Paul wrote in his column that Chuck Fairbanks, “drew favorable comparisons to Parcells and warranted discussion.” But that will be as far as it will go. Without the Senior Committee meeting, Fairbanks and Russ Francis have a snowball’s chance in hell of making the Hall.
Players Early In For “Voluntary” Workouts: WRs Kayshon Boutte and DeMario “Pop” Douglas have recently been in the facility ahead of the start of the voluntary offseason program on Monday. That is some good news to hear.
Josh McDaniels: McDaniels said he was thrilled to be back in Foxboro and had great things to say about Drake Maye.
“I’m smitten by the young man in terms of just his personality. We’ve had an opportunity to spend some time that has nothing to do with football with one another, which has been great,” McDaniels said.
“Next week and beyond will be really fun to get to know him from a football perspective. I couldn’t be more excited about the young man that we have.“
Doug Marrone: Great nugget from Mike Reiss talking about the Patriots OL coach. “When LSU OT/G Will Campbell arrived at Gillette Stadium for a recent ‘Top 30’ visit, it wasn’t the first time OL coach Doug Marrone had made a personal connection with him. Marrone recruited him coming out of high school (along with other current draft prospects Kelvin Banks Jr., Josh Conerly Jr., among others) when coaching at Alabama in 2021.”
Speaking of Campbell, I found it curious that Reiss mentioned Campbell as an “OT/G” in his post. To me, if the Patriots view Campbell as anything other than a LT, I wouldn’t draft him at #4. But that’s just me.
Patriots 4th & 2 Podcast: Derek and I discussed the Joe Milton trade and the front-seven prospects in the draft. Please check us out and listen to us on YouTube, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Russ Francis/Chuck Fairbanks: The former Patriot tight end and head coach should be in the Patriots team Hall of Fame, and the fact that Francis isn’t is an absolute travesty. Francis and the Raiders’ Dave Casper changed how teams used the tight end position. This will be displayed in our Sunday posts until it happens. Casper is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Francis’ numbers stand up well against Casper’s, yet he isn’t even in the team’s HOF.
Last week, the Patriots traded 2nd-year quarterback Joe Milton and a seventh-round draft pick to the Dallas Cowboys for a fifth-round draft pick. Many fans and media questioned if the Patriots could have gotten more from a trade for Milton.
It was later reported that another team had a better offer, but Milton requested to be traded to Dallas, and the Patriots did him a solid by sending him where he wanted to go.
Other reports have stated that Milton requested a trade as soon as the Patriots signed Josh Dobbs as their backup quarterback this spring, saying he wanted to go to someplace where he could compete for a starting job.
If that is the case, then I’m sure he and Dak Prescott won’t be the closest of friends this off-season. But that is the Cowboys’ issue now, an early poll on social media showed 61 percent of Cowboys’ fans believe that “Bazooka Joe” could be the starter this season.
But it was curious to see reports out of Dallas where Prescott lost a lot of weight this winter, to get lighter and faster in running the Cowboys’ offense. So, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the Cowboys have had interest in Milton for weeks now, confirming the rumors.
But one term we heard a lot of this week when discussing the Milton trade was “QB room dynamics” from the media, and that entails a very things which makes it intriguing.
But first, this a Mike Vrabel move pure and simple. Eliot Wolf drafted Milton, and he’s shown the potential to be a really good QB in the NFL. But Vrabel wanted him gone, Greg Bedard said that he actually wanted him out of the building by Monday morning before the players return for offseason workouts.
That sounds like a discipline issue, but that is strictly speculation at this point. Vrabel’s focus this season has been on installing players and coaches for his vision for the team and he’s isn’t shy about doing it.
“You can put it on me. I’m a big boy, trust me,” Vrabel said at the NFL Owners Meetings last week. “We’re going to have a lot of things that go well, which will be good to the players and the assistant coaches, and they’ll have some things that won’t go so well, and you can put those on me. I can handle it.”
Vrabel also had this to say about the situation that Milton was in.
“Yeah, I think Joe’s did everything that they asked him to do last year. Sounds like in conversations that he worked extremely hard, and that’s tough when you’re a quarterback,” Vrabel said. “Everybody wants to play. Everybody wants to be the starter, everybody and that’s great to have that attitude. And he was ready for his opportunity there late in the season, which I commend him on, just like I would any player that sat there and went through a long season, a difficult season, and then got the opportunity, went out, won a football game, played well, helped his team win.
“And then where that leads to, we’ll see as the draft approaches, or where Joe is on April 7 to start our offseason program. But you have to give Joe credit for being ready to go, going from the third quarterback to being able to win that football game and stay ready and stay hungry.”
Mike Reiss mentioned that the trade “clears the runway for Drake Maye,” while Bedard used the term that Vrabel was going to “clear the decks of Joe Milton.” That sounds like Milton was unhappy about the prospect of being the #3 QB again this season and Vrabel did not want any distractions in the QB room.
Maye didn’t need anyone to clear away any potential controversy for him. He’s the #1 guy in the QB room. Dobbs is the clear #2 and the coaches have surely made that clear to him. But apparently Milton didn’t want to hang around all offseason knowing that he didn’t fit into the teams plans, and be unemployed in August.
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“Yeah, definitely. That’s the short answer. I think this is always a very popular question. We have a language, and every offensive system and defensive system has a language. So, you have to decide the way you want to speak in terms of calling things and naming things, and whether you use numbers, protections, or you use words, or however you do what you do. So, our language has been refined a little bit between last year with the time that I had and this spring with the coaches.
“I think that’s really getting streamlined. It’s been great to have their perspective on it. Just being in the same type of language for my entire career has been good, and probably in some ways, it’s been a little different than most coaches.
“So, these guys have done a tremendous job of helping us streamline it. What’s most important is that the players can digest whatever it is we want to do. But there’s the language, and then there’s the strategy part. The language is how you talk; the strategy is all based about your players and what do we have, what are our strengths, how do we maximize the personnel that’s on our team and on our offense?
“That part is going to be different like it is every year. Whether you – ’07 was different than ’12, ’12 was different than ’17, everything was different than 2020. 2021 is going to be different than this year. So, the strategy and what we end up doing eventually will be all about what’s best for our players and how we can maximize the guys here.”
Patriots OC Josh McDaniels was asked if the Patriots would streamline the offense to fit the talents of QB Drake Maye better.
“Yeah, I think it was something you don’t ever think about doing, but I would say it’s a blessing to have the time to go back and look at what you’ve been through in terms of the changes and different highs, lows.
“You look back at the past in terms of what we’ve done schematically and what the league is doing now strategically. I had a really good opportunity last year to watch football without a lot of deadlines, which was a new, interesting opportunity for me and just see different things coming up throughout the course of the league.
“There are younger quarterbacks playing a little earlier than maybe they were 10, 12, 15 years ago. There are different things that people are using and doing schematically that are having a lot of success. There are some trends, like there always are, that are kind of, I’d say, in vogue now.
“Whether they stay in vogue for long, I don’t know, but it was just a really healthy opportunity for me to go back and look at what I’ve done, what I’ve been a part of, and then what else is going on in the league right now that I need to get better at, that I need to start thinking about incorporating.
“Then obviously, this opportunity with Thomas [Brown], Todd [Downing], Ashton [Grant], Doug [Marrone], Hoss [Jason Houghtaling], Kugs [Robert Kugler] and the guys we have here, I mean, it’s been tremendous for me to have this opportunity to really pick their brains, see what they know and glean as much information from them as I possibly can.
“I got an opportunity to go to a few different places last year; I won’t say where those were, but there were some great coaches that were very welcoming. College, pro, I had an opportunity to see for the very first time in my life somebody else run a meeting, somebody else run a practice, somebody else coach a quarterback, and those were invaluable opportunities for me.
I know I’ll be a different person in terms of going forward because of the experiences that I’ve had an opportunity to see.”
OC Josh McDaniels on how he reflects after a year away from football.
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“Somebody asked me what success looks like, and I said, ‘Yeah, you can judge it by wins and losses during the season, but success for me in the offseason is going to be that the players believe in what we’re doing, and they believe in the message, they believe in the teaching, and they believe in the connections that we’re making.’” — Mike Vrabel
Follow me on Twitter @SteveB7SFG or email me at [email protected]
Listen to our Patriots 4th and 2 podcasts on Apple and YouTube as Russ Goldman, Derek Havens, and I from PatsFans.com discuss the latest Patriots news and game analysis.
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