Pats Pulpit
New England is looking at a favorable schedule this upcoming season.
The New England Patriots have gone 4-13 in back-to-back years, but looking at their schedule for the 2025 season there appears to be a path to serious improvement. The team of first-year head coach Mike Vrabel, after all, will be going up against one of the easiest slates in the entire NFL this fall.
Using the traditional strength of schedule model, which looks at the previous season to determine how tough a team’s schedule is, we can see that the Patriots will be facing the third-easiest group of opponents in the league. It combined for a win percentage of just .429 in 2024, trailing only the San Francisco 49ers’ .415 and the New Orleans Saints’ .419.
However, strength of schedule based on what happened last season does have its flaws. For starters, there has been significant roster and coaching turnover in New England and across the entire NFL over the last few months.
A more predictive way of assessing a schedule is via projected win totals. Using this method, as compiled and visualized by Doug Analytics, the Patriots jump up a spot. While their .464 SOS still trails the 49ers’ .452, it is enough to leap-frog the Saints’ .472.
Using projected wins to determine the strength of a schedule is not without its problems either. These totals already factor in opponents, which in turn might inflate the win totals for teams that have easier projected schedules to begin with. Still, there is a strong argument that this methodology is superior to traditional SOS.
And when we look at it in detail, we can see that the Patriots will be going up against what is on paper a favorable schedule.
Not only will they face the fourth-placed teams across the AFC, they also will go against two of the worst divisions in football in full: the AFC South and the NFC South. In addition, their 17th game will be against another one of the worst teams in the NFL, the New York Giants.
With them part of the schedule as well, the Patriots will go up against what projects as the seven worst teams in the league this season — the only club to do so. They also will face the two highest-projected teams, the Buffalo Bills twice plus the Baltimore Ravens, but their schedule as a whole still is tilted in quite a positive fashion from a New England perspective.
Time will tell whether the Patriots can take advantage, or whether or not their schedule will indeed be as quote-on-quote easy as it looks. However, the fact that the team is projected to win 7.7 games — a respectable 20th in the NFL — speaks for itself.
