Patriots’ Jabrill Peppers ready for clean slate after a difficult 2024 season
"I think every year in the league is a fresh start."
FOXBOROUGH — Organized team activities (OTAs) are often where the foundations for a new season are first put in place.
A new season represents a clean slate for every NFL player. And based on all that has transpired over the past year, Patriots safety Jabrill Peppers is ready to put 2024 in the rearview mirror.
Now only was Peppers on a Patriots team that bottomed out with a 4-13 record, but the 29-year-old safety also found himself embroiled in a domestic violence case of which he was later acquitted in January.
In the case, a woman accused Peppers of choking her, slamming her head against a wall, and throwing her down a flight of stairs. He was later acquitted on charges of strangulation, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, and assault and battery on a family or household member.
“I’m just happy it’s over with, and I get to get back to doing what I love to do,” Peppers said after Wednesday’s OTA session at Gillette Stadium. “It was a learning experience. I learned a lot from it.”
While Peppers was acquitted, he missed seven games in the middle of the 2024 season after being put on the Commissioner’s exempt list following the incident. Despite being reinstated and cleared for game action in early December, Peppers only played in two of New England’s final five games due to injury.
The 2024 season marked Peppers’ eighth year in the NFL — all of which have ended with sub-.500 records between the Browns, Giants, and Patriots.
The veteran is hoping that trend changes in 2025, especially after a busy offseason that saw the Patriots hire Mike Vrabel and add talent across the depth chart.
“I think every year in the league is a fresh start,” Peppers said. “No matter how well you do, or how bad you do, if you’re lucky enough to have the opportunity to sit in one of these seats, year in and year out, that’s more opportunity to prove yourself.
“I always look forward to that — whether I do well, whether the year didn’t go the way I wanted it to.”
Peppers stands as one of the few returning veterans on a reworked Patriots defense that added lineup regulars in Milton Williams, Carlton Davis, Robert Spillane, and Harold Landry earlier this spring.
The former Michigan standout is also the only original 2024 Patriots captain still on New England’s roster — with both Hunter Henry and Kyle Dugger promoted as captains in the middle of the 2024 campaign.
A healthy Peppers should provide a big boost to the Patriots as a hard-hitting stalwart in the secondary alongside Dugger. New England’s free-agency spending spree should give Peppers some help on the defensive side of the ball, but Peppers doesn’t believe he needs to alter his approach as one of the few holdovers from what have been middling rosters as of late in Foxborough.
“I just try to be the same guy every day,” Peppers said. “I love this game, it’s a big passion for me, and I just try to show that. Try to lead by example, do what the coaches say every time I’m supposed to do it so the young guys have something to follow, and keep the standard, the standard. That’s never going to change no matter who comes in here. The standard is the standard.”
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