Pats Pulpit
The New England Patriots have had their fair share of questionable moves in the last five years, playing a part in their swift drop-off from annual Super Bowl contenders to one of the least talented teams in the NFL. The hope was that Mike Vrabel would come in with a strong plan and vision to right the ship.
Initially, that very much seemed to be the case. In very well still might be, but the way that the Patriots have handled the roster construction around the cutdown deadline last week does raise some questions about the clarity of said vision.
For starters, even though they made some major investments this offseason, the Patriots’ roster remains lacking quality depth players. The thought of keeping players on the roster that they didn’t intend on keeping long-term — like the since-released Kendrick Bourne and Jabrill Peppers — is therefore quite strange. Sure, they may have held out hope that they could still trade those players, but hope alone does not prevent you from potentially losing young talent you have to part ways with to keep them around.
For as much success as he has had early in his Patriots tenure, Bourne had no business on the initial 53-man roster. He had been playing with the third unit since the start of camp, and seemed to have lost a step ever since his torn ACL suffered in October 2023. Him making the roster, only to be cut the next day to help clear space for the likes of Tommy DeVito and Charles Woods was curious. The fact that they chose to cut a rookie fifth-rounder who had shown some promise, among others, to keep Bourne, makes this an even weirder decision.
Jabrill Peppers, on the other hand, had been playing with the starters all camp until the last few days. He was seemingly one of the leaders of the team, and looked like a fit for the type of defense that the Patriots wanted to play: physical, versatile, committed.
It seemed like the safety that was on the chopping block was Kyle Dugger, and yet, Dugger is still here and Peppers was cut on Friday, seemingly out of the blue. It sounds like nothing happened off the field that would force the Patriots’ hand in cutting him, so the timing feels off. They simply and significantly weakened their secondary depth for no apparent reason; the fact that they did so amidst rumors about Christian Gonzalez’s availability early in the season doesn’t help.
Those two moves stand out, but they are not the only example of the Patriots recently making questionable roster decisions.
Take a look at quarterback. It seems that the Patriots were not happy with the play that they got out of Joshua Dobbs as the backup to Drake Maye (let alone Ben Wooldridge as QB3), so they put in a waiver claim for Tommy DeVito. However, now that DeVito is on the team, they still decided to keep Dobbs on the roster,...
