With Julian Edelman's fate decided, Patriots have much to sort out at receiver spots

With the Friday news Julian Edelman is not going to pursue any further appeals when it comes to his four-game ban for a PED violation, there’s now some clarity around his situation when it comes to the first month of the regular season.

But it puts the capper on an eventful offseason for the wide receiver position for the Patriots. No spot has seen more action over the last few months. The Patriots lost Danny Amendola in free agency, and traded away Brandin Cooks. They added Jordan Matthews and Cordarelle Patterson in free agency and Braxton Berrios in the draft. Meanwhile, they anticipated the (eventual) return of Edelman and Malcolm Mitchell, both of whom spent all of 2017 on the shelf because of knee issues. Amazingly, with training camp set to kick off next week, there are only two receivers returning who actually had a role on the field at the end of last season -- Chris Hogan and Phillip Dorsett. (That's in addition to youngsters Riley McCarron and Cody Hollister, who were practice squadders last year.)

That’s a lot of moving parts for a position that had enjoyed a measure of stability over the previous few seasons. One constant? Receivers coach Chad O’Shea. His return should be able to create some continuity. But he’ll have his work cut out for himself, at least when it comes to the first month of the season.

As surely as summer follows spring, someone will ask Bill Belichick over the first few days of training camp how they plan to replace Edelman’s production over the first month of the season. And just as surely, Belichick will respond with some variation of the old maxim: You can’t replace Julian Edelman with one guy. As we noted here, it’ll be a collective. There will be a heavy reliance on slotback James White, but there should be opportunities for a wide variety of people.

(One thing to keep in mind: Rob Gronkowski was going to get a ton of targets regardless, and as we've seen over the course of his career, his presence minimizes any sort of personnel issues at wide receiver. This is more of a focus specifically on the position, the depth chart, and how specific targets will be distributed with Edelman gone.)

Ultimately, even though there’s a resolution to Edelman’s status, here are three questions we still have about the wide receiver position heading into training camp.