It is, for all intents and purposes, go time for the New England Patriots. Coaches are back in the office on Monday; select players (QBs/rookies) are due midweek, and the rest of the gang has to be in place on Friday in advance of day one of training camp Saturday morning.
Despite reaching the Super Bowl a season ago, and improving their roster, there are plenty of questions that this team needs to answer in the coming weeks and months. With that in mind, I thought I’d pose a handful of concerns/thoughts today and later this week.
Let’s start with the defensive side of the ball.
1. Do the Patriots have enough on the edge?
I asked Mike Vrabel if the team needed help at that spot before the final day of mandatory mini-camp in June.
“No, that’s a good group,” he responded. “I’m excited about adding Dre'[Mont Jones], the development of [Elijah] Ponder and [Bradyn] Swinson. We added [Jesse] Luketa and some young guys. Again, we’ll continue to try to look at every position and make it stronger, but that group has done a nice job. Again, we’ll continue to look at it, but we’ll have to see where we are at numbers-wise, and when we get into training camp, just how many guys you can rep, based on the practices.”
If I had full faith in that assessment, I would not be posing this as a question. But when you’ve done this as long as I have, you know that sometimes coaches/players/executives say what they have to, and that may not always align with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In this case, why signal to the younger players, Ponder and Swinson, that they might not be enough? You don’t. Instead, you pump their tires and hope they seize whatever opportunity might be in front of them.
But with no updates on second-round pick Gabe Jacas’ contract (he’s the only unsigned 2026 2nd-rounder in the NFL) or physical health (he had a procedure this spring), the Pats are leaner than they want to be here.
I know Greg thinks Jacas might have a hard time beating out Ponder and Swinson for reps, but to me, if the team was worried about that, there’s no way they would have traded up for the player. Instead, New England sent the No. 63, No. 131, and No. 202 picks to the Chargers to jump to 55 and get its man. They didn’t do that so he could marinate on the scout team all year. No sirree, Bob-o. Vrabel and company were (are?) expecting him to impact the 2026 Patriots on game day. Not saying he can’t, but Jacas is behind, and the longer he remains out/unsigned, the less likely he is to play a substantial role on this unit.
That then leaves it up to Ponder to take a big step forward in year two - hurry up, because the media bandwagon on him is nearly full - or Swinson to show he can play. That was not discernible a season ago, though, to his credit, he seems to have remade his body some. But will Swinson win on the regular, as he did at LSU, or is this the typical spring hype that fizzles in the summertime heat?
Oh, and there’s Landry, who had a very nice start to 2025 before the knee injury that required offseason surgery and had him sidelined for the entirety of the spring. Do you feel confident in a 30-year-old coming off another knee surgery to be what he was before? Knowing Landry, he’s put in the work, but there are a lot of miles on that body.
Finally, when it comes to Jones being a one-for-one swap with K’Lavon Chaisson, I’m not so sure I agree, at least not from a pass rush perspective. Jones doesn’t win like Chaisson did/does. He’s a power-based player without the wiggle and bendability that made Chaisson a threat. In that sense, Jones could actually be a slight downgrade, at least in the pass game. His influence as a run defender should be better than the man he’s replacing, but that’s a relatively low bar, and the metrics say Jones hasn’t been as stout as his frame/reputation would indicate.
2. Does the signing of Kevin Byard signal a different style in the secondary?
I’d be surprised if the answer is no, but that’s not from anything I witnessed this spring. That’s just based on who Byard is and where he’s at in this stage of his career. The soon-to-be 33-year-old should work mostly as the center fielder and mitigate big plays, or, because of his history of finding the football, even dissuade opponents from taking that chance.
Despite an All-Pro season with Chicago in 2025-26, Byard doesn’t run as well as he used to, and his intelligence and instincts are the real backbone of who he is as a player. That was the case during his years spent with Vrabel and company in Tennessee, but obviously those legs had some more juice (oh, to be young again). I’m certain we’ll see him in the box at times, but unlike how the Pats played with Jaylinn Hawkins and the emergent Craig Woodson, there should be a clear delineation between the two men. Byard as free safety and Woodson as the strong safety. I'm not suggesting it will be a massive philosophical shift - everything else will remain similar around them - but the idea of any good staff is to get your players in the best position possible, and this, to me, is the way for both men to thrive.
Woodson, entering his second-year, is at his best moving forward, with good awareness and an ability to sort his way through traffic to get to the intended target. As a pass defender, however, Woodson struggled in man coverage, faring much better when he could sit back in zone, read route combinations and then attack the football.
The Pats were 9th in man coverage % rate and 23rd in zone %. Will that number be a little more even? If the Pats can generate more pressure with a four-man rush, yes. If they can’t, and need to embrace a heavy-blitz rate again, they’ll be more in line with last season, assuming their cornerbacks hold up at a similar level as they did in ‘25 (cornerback play is more volatile than just about any position in the game from year-to-year).
3. How does Zak Kuhr want to live defensively against the pass?
Even as the league starts to trend back toward heavier personnel and places renewed emphasis on the run game, it’s still a pass-first league. In Kuhr’s first season as defensive coordinator (he has now ditched the interim title with Terrell Williams moving into the assistant head coach role), his front four struggled to get consistent pressure on opposing QBs. Christian Barmore got off to a slow start, and once Harold Landry hurt his knee against New Orleans, the team lost its best rusher in two-man games.
Thus, Kuhr had to go into the lab and cook up some diabolical bleep, err…blitzes. The Pats finished the year 13th in blitz rate (just below 28%). But if you were to pick it up over the final month of the regular season and into the postseason, the percentages soared above 40%.
“It is (a) game-to-game (decision),” Kuhr said after the playoff win over the Chargers, “but at some point, you got to feel what is working best for you without being reckless.”
I can’t imagine that 40%+ number carrying over into 2026, at least on a week-to-week basis. But then again, if the Landry/Jones/Ponder/whomever combo platter isn’t winning with regularity on the edge, Kuhr may have no choice but to embrace that level of aggressiveness again. The Pats finished last season with just 35 sacks (22nd in the league) and had a 35% pass-rush win rate (19th best).