It was the little big men for the Patriots, Dion Lewis and Julian Edelman who did the damage for the Pats offense.
Do you think that Patriots fans, missed football? Saturday’s practice had the incredible number of 21,781 fans packing the Gillette practice fields
Belichick and McDaniel will have to walk a fine line here. Garoppolo must be prepared to take the field against the Cardinals and run the offense smoothly
McCourty is the quarterback of the secondary, a co-captain of the team and the glue that holds everything together on the backend.
Rather than being a weakness, corner became a position of strength in 2015. Butler parlayed his SB heroics into a very solid first season of starting.
With many of the Sox on-hand to include skipper John Farrell, Edelman put on quite the show, blasting several homers over the Green Monster.
The Patriots have two of the best LBs in the business with Jamie Collins and Dont’a Hightower. But each missed time in 2015 and the depth was a problem.
They added Terrance Knighton, Frank Kearse, and Markus Kuhn in FA, Vincent Valentine in the draft and Chris Long, this season’s reclamation project.
NFL Network’s Willie McGinest was asked to rate the top five linebacker units in the league and not surprisingly, he gave the Patriots high marks.
The truly two most important aspects of the Combine? The interviews and the medicals and those are the two parts that all of us aren’t allowed to see.
The Patriots should find a younger, more athletic right tackle and then re-do Vollmer’s contract and move him to swing tackle. That falls in line with the Patriots way of thinking, which is to replace a player perhaps a year too soon rather than a year too late.
What the Patriots would really like is an upgrade at the RCB position and move Ryan into the slot. Bill Belichick loves his veterans on the defense and would like to bring in a veteran presence and allow the others to compete and sort out the rest.
Now the team has to decide whether to bring back Chandler who also battled injuries last season for a second go around and cover his cap hit of $3 million-dollars or cut him for a savings of $2.05 million.
The Patriots lost an iconic figure with the retirement of Jerod Mayo this week, and while it wasn’t entirely unsuspected it leaves the Patriots with a depth issue behind starters Hightower and Collins. Those two are arguably the best pair of linebackers in the league and the team’s immediate concern is locking them up long-term.
The team needs some youth, size and speed on the outside. Not necessarily a deep threat, that everyone clamors for, since that isn’t their offense. But someone who can stretch the field horizontally as well as vertically and has the size to go up and grab those contested throws.