Some Patriots news and notes on this Friday:
1) Former Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman made an interesting revelation during a recent appearance with Colin Cowherd.
During the interview, Edelman was asked if he knew at the time that 2020 would be his final season. That was a tough year for Edelman, who played six games but suffered a knee injury that ultimately required surgery and saw him placed on injured reserve in October.
Edelman said it wasn’t until the year ended that he started realizing that his knee simply wasn’t responding the way he had hoped from the injury he suffered that season.
“It wasn’t until my last year finished,” said Edelman, referencing when he realized his career was over. “That last game finished, that’s when I knew my career was over, probably. Because I was trying to recover from a knee thing, a root tear, and the amount of energy I was putting in. I used to get this much output [gesturing]. The amount of energy I was putting in was up here [gesturing], and I’m getting this much output [gesturing]. I can never recover and get my knee right. It was going to be a long road for me to go down.”
“I didn’t want to go down that road.”
Something Edelman’s dad told him when the former wideout finally told him he was finally walking away from football also stood out.
“I remember when I told my dad I was retiring,” Edelman explained. “He told me, ‘You finally smartened up.’ And he said that because he said, ‘It’s like a fighter pilot. You have to be willing to die doing your job. You have to be on that edge of reckless to go out and do what you have to do. And the day where you have to think about going to the reckless is the day you’re done.'”
2) Meanwhile, Edelman has been a big supporter of Drake Maye, who seems to have impressed him so far. He talked about an encounter with Maye following a visit to the team when he spoke to the players in the locker room, with Edelman saying Maye asked him questions about the offense, while showing a hunger that was noticeable.
“What jumped out to me? Drake Maye, the question he asked me, the hunger that he had. I went in and talked to the team, and afterwards, Drake came by, and they’re running the same offense that we were in. He kind of asked me, ‘Hey, what do you see on this?’ It was a smart question. That stood out to me that he didn’t have an intimidation factor of being embarrassed to go out and ask a guy a question that’s been in the system that he’s going to try to go be in and ask that kind of question. I thought that was big.”
“His leadership, the leadership of the coaches, there was a good tempo, not a lot of standing around. So I’m excited to see what they do this year.”
3) Yesterday marked the 12th anniversary of one of the most unreal stories we’ve ever seen, with former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez both arrested and charged in the murder of Odin Lloyd on June 26, 2013.
That sequence of events was definitely pretty crazy. The moment the news came out that he had been taken into custody on that murder charge, the Tweet by the team announcing Hernandez’s release from the organization came out mere moments later.
Some will say that he hadn’t yet been found guilty of a crime, but internally, the team likely already was aware of the evidence against him. That proved to be the case years later.
During the police announcement, the evidence against him was pretty iron-clad. They had him on camera over the course of the entire drive the night of the murder, which ultimately ended in an industrial park barely a mile from Hernandez’s home, where Lloyd’s body was found.
Hernandez was ultimately convicted in April two years later in 2015, mere months after the Patriots had won their first Super Bowl in more than a decade.
Looking back, the Patriots had managed to extend both he and Rob Gronkowski, giving them a pretty lethal duo that would have been a problem for teams for years to come. But what Hernandez did changed everything, both in football and for the Lloyd family, and it will forever be remembered as a dark moment for the franchise.
The club ended up allowing fans to exchange Hernandez’s jersey, which was considered to be a huge step at the time as the club began erasing him from the franchise.
He became a cautionary tale for a guy who had it all, saying just a year earlier that he was focused on change, but never managed to achieve it.
“I’m engaged now, and I have a baby. So, it’s just gonna make me think of life a lot differently and doing things the right way,” Hernandez said just a year earlier after signing his extension. “Now, another one is looking up to me. I can’t just be young and reckless Aaron no more. I’m gonna try to do the right things, become a good father and [her] be raised like I was raised.”
4) The Patriots announced on Thursday that the club has waived defensive tackle, Wilfried Pene.
Pene joined the Patriots earlier this spring, with the former Virginia Tech standout joining the team as an undrafted free agent. Pene was also an International Pathway Player, giving the team an international exemption while allowing New England an additional roster spot.
His addition would have seen him in the mix potentially battling for a position down the depth chart along New England’s defensive line. Instead, the club clearly made the decision to trim down that group, allowing the other guys competing to get more reps for the coaching staff to evaluate.
The roster now sits at 90 players, with just under a month before training camp opens on July 23rd at Gillette Stadium.
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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.
