The final report card for the 2024 New England Patriots has finally arrived and the results are tremendously unrewarding. It started with three gut-crushing defeats in humiliating fashion but concluded with a victory against the Buffalo Bills in the comforts of Gillette Stadium. To be quite honest, they deserve a D+ just for that alone.
Unfortunately, it was not enough for Jerod Mayo to secure his job as the head coach as he was relieved of his duties just two hours later. The good news is that Mike Vrabel is back in the building, a man with the cache and the reputation to boost this team back to respectability. Even though it has been an agonizing and miserable season for all, let’s look at the five biggest things to have hope for in the next few months.
The Ghastly Report Card of the New England Patriots
1. The Patriots Might Have Two Quarterbacks
The regular season ended with a 23-16 victory over the Bills. Drake Maye only played in the first series before handing the keys over to third-string rookie Joe Milton III, who had himself a solid performance. He started the game with two straight touchdown drives: the first ended with a one-yard rushing score on a zone read, and the second was capped off with a forty-eight-yard strike to Kayshon Boutte!
Milton finished the afternoon with over 240 passing yards and just seven incompletions, along with zero sacks or turnovers. He showed a lot of promise in the preseason and all of it paid off in his first regular-season action, because if it was not for his poise and determination, then New England might have clinched the number one overall pick in the draft after all. Maye might be the face of the franchise, but Joe Milton is one player that this team should absolutely keep around for the foreseeable future.
2. Jerod Mayo Has Officially Been Fired
Before Bill Belichick was ever let go by the Patriots, he and the Kraft family planned for Mayo to be the successor as the head coach of this football team. When it happened in 2023, nobody knew what was going to happen. On one hand, Mayo could have been viewed as a breath of fresh air because Belichick’s aggressive style might have worn out the locker room over the last few years. But on the other side, Mayo was placed in the worst situation at the worst time.
The roster had serious holes to fill and there were not a lot of free agents that they could attract, so it looked like 2024 was going to be another lost season. Unfortunately, it turned out to be just that with a 4-13 campaign and Mayo was a big reason why. The defense completely regressed under his watch, the offense continued to perform abysmally, and all the head coach did was subtly throw his players and assistants under the bus. Patriots owner Robert Kraft had all of the patience in the world to let Mayo finish out the season, but even he knew that things needed to change, despite the cruel politics of one-and-done coaches.
3. Welcome Back Mike Vrabel
The Patriots were the first team to hire a new head coach in 2025, bringing back former linebacker Vrabel to do exactly what he did when he was the main guy in charge with the Tennessee Titans: establish a winning culture and put the team back on the map. However, this is absolutely a high-risk high-reward hire. When you look at Vrabel’s track record with Tennessee, it signals a lot of promise. In his second season, they went to the AFC Championship and knocked off the Patriots and Baltimore Ravens to get there, before ultimately losing to the eventual champion Kansas City Chiefs.
Two years later, Vrabel won Coach of the Year by lifting an injury-riddled roster to having the number one seed in the conference, before losing to Joe Burrow and the Cincinnati Bengals at home in the second round. But at the same time, his last two seasons with the team ended with losing records, and a couple of reasons why were because the offense was bottom-of-the-pack and the defense was average at best.
In retrospect, hiring Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson might not have been the perfect solution, but there would at least be hope that Maye would develop into a general quarterback and the offense would lead in that direction as well. Vrabel made it clear on more than a few occasions that the development of Maye will be the biggest priority, but before anybody can believe that this is true, the Patriots need to go all in this offseason to address the glaring weaknesses on this football team.
4. Brenden Schooler and Christian Gonzalez are All-Pros
Everybody has brought up the fact that Maye is the only bright spot with the Patriots right now, and that is reasonable because he plays the most important position in the sport. However, this football team has a couple of other players who shone bright and proved to be difference-makers.
Special teams ace Brenden Schooler was recently announced as a First-Team All-Pro Selection, while cornerback Christian Gonzalez was added to the second team! Many Patriots fans will be biased and say that both of them should have been on the first, but these are tremendous individual accomplishments regardless. Schooler and Gonzalez are getting the recognition and respect that they absolutely deserve, but more importantly, they are two of the key building blocks of the foundation of this franchise.
5. The Main Goal of the Offseason is to Go All In
Now that Vrabel has been hired, one of the biggest priorities for the Patriots is to sign as many players as possible in free agency. This organization has the most cap space out of any other team in the league, so there is no excuse for them to remain passive and quiet, especially after two consecutive four-win seasons. There are three huge areas of weakness that must be addressed with this football team; the first being the offensive line.
Michael Onwenu and David Andrews are the only solid guys on this front, so they are going to need all of the help they can get, especially since the latter is near the end of his career. Because the Patriots have the fourth overall pick, they can either address the line right away in free agency, or they can wait until the draft and select somebody like Will Campbell or Kelvin Banks Jr. Either way, this team has to decide quickly which direction they want to head towards, or else Maye’s confidence is going to get destroyed.
The second position group that New England must address is wide receiver. Demario Douglas and Kayshon Boutte proved to be decent options, but Kendrick Bourne lost a couple of steps after suffering a torn ACL last season, and Hunter Henry was the only reliable option that Maye and Jacoby Brissett had at their disposals.
Two potentially available wide receivers come to mind: AJ Brown and Tee Higgins. The former spent the first few years of his career in Tennessee with Vrabel as the head coach and both of them have a strong relationship to this day, while the latter is going to command a big contract as the number one option on any football team. Patriots executive Eliot Wolf did his best to sign Calvin Ridley and Brandon Aiyuk but failed both times. With Vrabel as the head coach, there is a strong chance that the odds will be better this time around, yet acquiring either one of them is way easier said than done.
Lastly, one deficiency that was not addressed by the Patriots as much as it should have been over the last two years was the lack of a pass rush. Now they extended guys like Christian Barmore and Anfernee Jennings, but the former was out for an extended period of the year due to blood clots and the latter finished the season with just two and a half sacks. Keion White got off to a hot start to the year after taking Joe Burrow down a couple of times in week one but only had a few more quarterback takedowns since then.
There are not too many promising edge rushers that are available in free agency besides Josh Sweat, so the best option that New England should take is to draft Abdul Carter with their fourth overall selection. He is one of the top two defensive prospects in the 2025 class and a player who could not only revive the team’s dissipating front seven but set a standard for the rest of the football team with his heart and passion for the game.
The beginning of the free agency tampering period cannot come any faster and New England has a lot of tough choices they have to make. We can only entrust Vrabel and Wolf to do what needs to be done for this team to reach respectability once again, but if they slack off and fail to get the prized guys who can turn things around, then you might as well write off the 2025 season.
Main Image: David Butler II-Imagn Images
