After a week off, the Patriots will return to action this weekend against the Giants in a matchup that could have a significant impact on the draft’s top five selections this spring. With some time to evaluate their 2-8 team, Patriots coaches should have some changes up their sleeves as the team prepares for a final seven-game run to end the season. What could those changes look like and how might the team go into the offseason? Here are your mailbag questions.

I understand that playing “moneyball” has historically been very successful for the Pats and is one of their organizational strengths (along with great ownership / culture / player development / willingness to bring great former Pats back into the fold (eg. Collins, Chung, Hoyer etc.), but are they taking it too far? There seem to be a lot of Pats still playing at a high level elsewhere that we could have retained if we paid them. Instead we let them go and then seem to panic and sign free agents that often don’t work out as well as the departed. -Brian Fiedler

There’s a lot to unpack here, but let’s start with the “money ball” of it all, which I believe is the general notion that the Patriots have tried to build a team that has a strong middle class and focuses more on spreading out the cap hits rather than overinvesting in just a couple players. Not sure exactly who we’d say got away, other than Joe Thuney and Jakobi Meyers. I think both of those players could help this team right now, but Thuney is more complicated than Meyers due to the team’s attention to the guard spot since 2020. Really, they shouldn’t be missing Thuney after hitting on Onwenu and then spending a first-round pick at the left guard spot that ultimately became Thuney’s replacement in Cole Strange.

So not to beat a dead horse from my perspective but to me it’s not the spending model it’s draft misses and lack of players selected by the team who are even worthy of a big contract. Even this offseason we’re looking primarily at Kyle Dugger, Onwenu and Josh Uche with expiring contracts and none of them should necessarily break the bank. They spent in free agency in 2021 but I think we can all see now that it’s hit or miss when you go that route. To me, the cycle is broken because there isn’t a core of players from the draft that are defining the team, it’s a mish mosh of older veterans and free agents, with just a smattering of players that have developed and even those are now facing a crossroads with the team.

Of all the things that have surfaced in the last 1-1/2 seasons of Patriots football, this “It was all Brady–Belichick is nothing without Tom”-narrative has bothered me the most. Pats fans are unbelievably spoiled, and the Pats-haters are simply too myopic to recognize that there was SO MUCH more to the unprecedented success of the team than a QB who evolved into the GOAT. The three Patriots-assistants who lasted the longest (with brief stints away from the team) are/were Dante Scarnecchia, Ernie Adams and Josh McDaniels. All three are gone. As are the treasure trove of great assistants like Romeo Crennel, Charlie Weis, Eric Mangini, Brian Flores, Brian Daboll and now Matt Patricia. There are more, but those are the headliners.

I’m curious if you feel that part of why Bill has fortified his coaching staff with family members is because they are the least likely to leave him with a void to fill in the offseason–as seems particularly the case with McDaniels’ departure, that caught him by surprise when he had to wait a year to fill the position with O’Brien, his obvious first choice. -Steve Eckert