Pats Pulpit
The Patriots’ new head coach met with the media at the Combine on Tuesday.
Mike Vrabel has spent the first month on the job learning the ins and outs of the New England Patriots roster. He knows the team today will look “vastly different” than the one at the end of August.
Part of that is due to the upcoming roster shuffle in free agency, where the Patriots have over $130 million in projected cap space to significantly upgrade their talent.
Speaking at the NFL Combine on Tuesday, Vrabel was hopeful that would be the case.
“Hopefully aggressive,” Vrabel responded when asked about the team’s free agency approach. “We want to be aggressive, we want to target players we feel like are going to help us, that are going to be outstanding players, and are going to be outstanding additions to the locker room and the community, and if that all fits and the compensation fits, but I’m confident we’ll be aggressive.
“There’s going to be this high level that things are going to get done very quickly. That’ll transition then to maybe just some mid-range dollars, and then obviously, you look at opportunities. So free agency gets broken down into compensation, and then it gets broken down into opportunity. I feel like we’re in a position to offer both as far as compensation and opportunity for some of these players.”
The work has already began internally for Vrabel and the Patriots front office — now led by Executive Vice President of Player Personnel Eliot Wolf along with Vice President of Player Personnel Ryan Cowden — to identify potential fits and different courses of action once the free agency period opens in March.
At the forefront of those plans will be upgrading both the offensive and defensive lines, especially after an eye-catching performance in Super Bowl LIX in the trenches from the Philadelphia Eagles.
“I think you always talk about being able to protect [Drake Maye]. You have to be able to have some guys that can help him on the edges and be able to make contested catches,” Vrabel said. “You have to look at the lines of scrimmage and you look no further than the Super Bowl game where that game was clearly run at the line of scrimmage.”
When looking for upgrades this offseason, New England has roughly $30 more million in cap space then the next closest team. That could allow them to win a bidding war for a certain player if necessary,
“I like to shop like everybody else,” Vrabel said. “And so when you go and there’s only one of a certain car, maybe you have to pay a little bit more for that one car because there’s only one of them. When you start to get into a range where you feel like there’s an area where players are comparable, and you like three or four players in a certain area for a certain role, you may not have to overspend. But it’s...
