Don’t let draft capital sour a rebuilding-worthy Patriots win
Sunday's win knocked the 2-6 Patriots out of the No. 1 slot down to No. 3 in the potential NFL draft order.
COMMENTARY
If the draft nerds are making you feel uneasy about celebrating an energizing, comeback win for your team — all while further demoralizing their fatuous division rival — rest assured, they had their chances.
Words in this space have encouraged the New England Patriots to tank for the No. 1 draft pick, both in 2020 and last season. They wound up with Mac Jones instead of Trevor Lawrence, which was like coming up empty in lieu of winning 50 cents on a $1 scratch ticket. It meant Drake Maye instead of Caleb Williams or Jayden Daniels. TBD.
Maybe Lawrence would play to his potential in New England, or there’s the chance he could have Daniel Jones-d the team into a long-term deal that becomes an albatross (hello, Deshaun Watson). The limited flashes we’ve seen from Drake Maye have to encourage Patriot fans, but then you watch the sort of drama Daniels displayed with the Commanders over the weekend and you kind of wonder, was THE guy right there a pick ahead of you, if not for a pointless Christmas Eve win in Denver?
Maybe you should have been ridiculed if you celebrated that one.
Sunday’s dramatic, 25-22 win over the annually-inadequate New York Jets wasn’t of the same caliber.
There are a lot more factors to rebuilding this team than losing enough to secure the No. 1 pick in next spring’s draft. We saw some on Sunday, when the Patriots, insulted to their core by their head coach one week prior, responded by pulling out a win with their backup quarterback. Jerod Mayo received a lot of blowback for calling his team “soft” last week in London, but what if those words got players to react and self-reflect? Is the rookie coach growing up right before our eyes?
The game was less about the brick wall Aaron Rodgers has splatted the Jets into and more about the Patriots showing a sign that they might be slowly forming into… something. Despite losing Maye to a concussion, Jacoby Brissett showed why he’s a dependable backup quarterback, helping lead the team on its final drive of the day. Despite only being 2-6 on the season, the New England locker room is probably a lot different today than the darkness the 2-6 Jets find themselves in. Don’t worry, they’ll land Shedeur Sanders. And ruin him too.
Barring catastrophic injury, the Patriots are constructing a team that has no use for Sanders as the No. 1 pick. New England needs a tackle, despite the tantalizing presence of Travis Hunter in the top three. If they land No. 1, they can trade down in order to grab either Will Campbell out of LSU or Kelvin Banks Jr. out of Texas. According to Tankathon, both offensive tackles will only be available until the fifth pick (Campbell going No. 5 to the Jacksonville Jaguars, Banks to the Los Angeles Rams at No. 12).
The win Sunday knocked the team out of the No. 1 slot down to No. 3 in the potential draft order, but let’s not goad ourselves into thinking the Patriots are really a good team that got off to a bad start. There’s a reasonable argument to be made that the team should be 4-4 and in the hunt right now, but the Patriots are still bad. They have a chance to win two in a row when they visit Tennessee Sunday, and could stitch together another 2-3 wins along the way toward January. A 6-11 season is not likely to land No. 1, not with Carolina and the Jets (and Giants and Cardinals and Browns and Raiders and Jaguars) mucking up the process. If you’d rather the Patriots remain in competition with those losers for draft capital, then might we introduce you to the Jets? Still accepting fandom.
The San Diego (I know) Chargers finished 5-12 last season and landed the fifth pick in the draft. They selected the best offensive tackle in the class, Joe Alt from Notre Dame. Are we really frightened enough that the Patriots are going to insist on becoming anything more competitive than that over the final nine games?
Mayo was thrust into an impossible situation with the talent he inherited after years of the franchise enabling its twilight head coach to handle the drafting. Nobody really thought the Patriots could be an ambitious team, particularly after Eliot Wolf was finished with the board in 2024, otherwise known as “Drake Maye and…woof.” But now that they have the quarterback, the most difficult position on which to hit jackpot, it’s time for the Patriots to build toward something else. Save the top pick sweepstakes for the normal participants. Slowly building a winning culture after attainting those picks is where the annual losers tend to fail. If Mayo and the Patriots managed a semblance of that in Week 8, there is an entire second half of the season to allow it to swell into something compelling. Maybe even something worth rooting for.
Intangibles are an aspect that can be ridiculed, especially in a gridiron world where the dorks who ruined baseball are coming after the NFL. But when you find some, after all but giving up hope, that’s something to celebrate.
There are currently eight NFL teams with two wins to their name. The Panthers and Titans both only have one win. That’s an awful lot of competition for a top-10 pick. Don’t let Sunday change your perception.
The Patriots are right there with them. Another win or two isn’t going to change much.
But to tank for the sake of landing an extra draft pick by trading the coveted top slot? That’s a dangerous cycle that it can be difficult from which to escape. The Patriots’ final drive on Sunday should have meant more than draft position. It’s the first time we’ve seen a late-game, offensive response from them as a team.
That could prove more worthy for Mayo than wondering all season about which side of the ball Hunter will play.
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