Pats Pulpit
The aggregate of 24 post-draft grades shows that New England reigns supreme.
The New England Patriots ended the 2025 NFL Draft with 11 players added to their roster. Quantity is not the only defining feature of the team’s rookie class, however: it also received widespread praise for the quality of prospects brought aboard.
In fact, according to a recent breakdown by NFL analyst René Bugner, the Patriots had the most popular draft in the league when viewed through the eyes of post-draft grades.
Looking at 24 different evaluators, New England earned a GPA of 3.67 to narrowly beat out the second-placed New York Giants (3.65) for the highest mark in the league. For comparison, the league average was 3.02.
In terms of recognition, the 2025 draft marks a clear improvement for the Patriots. They ranked 12th in the NFL last year with an average of 3.2; in 2023, the final year under head coach/general manager Bill Belichick, they were 14th with a GPA of 3.1.
Of course, draft grades always need to be taken with a grain of salt. The quality of any class can only be accurately assessed a few years down the line, and the grading itself is naturally subjective and oftentimes ridiculously slanted (96.7 percent of grades represented in the graphic above are no worse than a C-).
What those grades do a good job of representing, though, is the perceived value a team got out of the draft. In the Patriots’ case, their grade is likely helped by the fact that they addressed their needs while also spending their premium picks in accordance with the evaluation consensus.
Add it all up, and you get a combined 18 As out of 24 grades.
The optimism surrounding New England’s recent draft class is not exclusive to the media either; it is shared within the organization, too. EVP of player personnel Eliot Wolf effectively said as much during his post-draft press conference on Sunday.
“I think we’ll be much more competitive this year,” Wolf explained after all 11 of the Patriots’ picks had been made. “I don’t like to put expectations on it, but I think we did a lot of things this offseason that were advantageous to us moving forward and we continue to improve the depth of the team and ignite competition.”
