We’re running a mailbag every Friday during the offseason. If you have questions on the Patriots, NFL, or want to gripe about past answers, email cmason@masslive.com or tweet @bychrismason. Now let’s get to this week’s questions!
Why did the Patriots draft Joe Milton III in the sixth round after taking Drake Maye? — Tom G.
I’ll give you three reasons:
1. Quarterback is insanely important
While the hope is that Drake Maye is the next great Patriots quarterback, at this point that’s all it is: Hope. Until Maye wins the starting job and starts delivering on Sundays, there’s no certainty that he’ll be the long-term answer in New England. As such, it makes sense to throw some extra darts at the board.
With Maye, the Patriots will already be on-boarding one rookie quarterback this season. Why not give him a classmate and bring them along together? Plus, Jacoby Brissett is on a one-year deal. If Maye is the player the Patriots front office thinks he is, he’ll need a long-term backup. If Milton can make some progress, he may check that box on a very inexpensive contract.
2. I think they want a total QB room overhaul
New England’s quarterback room wasn’t the world’s most harmonious place over the past two seasons, so I think Jerod Mayo is looking for a fresh start. They’ve already traded Mac Jones and cut Nathan Rourke, and I’d be surprised to see Bailey Zappe on the 53-man roster when Week 1 rolls around. With Maye, Brissett and Milton, the depth chart will be well-populated with new blood.
3. Milton is ridiculously athletic
Though Milton bristled at the idea of switching to tight end after being drafted — “That will never happen,” he said — Jerod Mayo didn’t slam the door shut on the idea of moving the 6-foot-5, 235-pound sixth-rounder around.
”We’ll have to see how that plays out once we put the pads on,” Mayo said, “but we drafted him as a quarterback.”
Milton clocked a 4.62-second 40-yard dash, he can broad jump over 10 feet, and has wingspan that measures 80 inches. Though he may be reluctant to move off quarterback to start, perhaps he’ll change his mind if it’s a way to get onto the field.
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Hindsight is 20/20, but do you think the Pats would have been better off taking a tackle at 34/37, and taking another receiver where they took Caedan Wallace, especially where it feels like they reached on Ja’Lynn Polk? — Matt K.
Nope.
The first tackle of the second round wasn’t taken until No. 55 overall — Patrick Paul, Dolphins — so it’s not like there was an abundance of good ones available up where the Patriots were picking. The blue-chip guys were gone by the end of the first round. There was a run on tackles late in the second round, so you could make an argument for moving back, but reaching for one in the 30s just to draft a tackle would have made little sense given where the board was at.
In your opinion, was the Tom Brady roast a needed escape valve to smooth out some hard feelings and strained relations with Robert Kraft, Bill Belichick and others? — Ed H.
I think Brady and Belichick are in a good place, but I don’t believe Kraft and Belichick are there yet. I thought the shot they took together on stage was pretty awkward — Belichick wasn’t exactly running up there to do it — and Julian Edelman and Drew Bledsoe didn’t mince words about how tense things were backstage before the show.
“Belichick’s kind of holding court, as he’s in the middle of the story, Kraft walks in and you guys all go over to say hi to Kraft,” Bledsoe said on Edelman’s “Games with Names” podcast. “And the last man standing, to hear him tell it, is my bro. He’s like, ‘Well, Bill’s telling this story, if I leave then he’s telling the story to nobody because everybody is saying hi to Kraft.’”
“The tension in that room though could cut (expletive) glass,” Edelman said. “I was so awkward. … I was like, ‘Oh (expletive), there’s going to be some fireworks.’ I just walked away. I didn’t want to get in there.”
“It was. It was real,” Bledsoe added. “… That was some crazy (expletive), man.”
Am I naive to think that Wallace should be able to play LT? People are saying LT is still our biggest weakness, but I feel like it surely can’t be that hard to switch from one tackle to the other — Jarod T.
Naive? Not necessarily. Very optimistic? Yes.
Colleague Karen Guregian collected some good insight on this from Dante Scarnecchia earlier this week. The legendary Patriots offensive line coach said it can be done, but it’s not easy and needs to be the right person. Matt Light, for example, struggled to flip.
“I think Matt could have played anywhere he wanted to play. But he was so ingrained, he was so comfortable at left tackle,” Scarnecchia said. “If anyone suggested, ‘Hey Matt, go on the right side and play,’ it was like Chinese arithmetic for him. It did not compute. And that was the issue with him.”
Scarnecchia also said it’ll be more challenging for Wallace to move to left tackle if he’s right-handed. So when he signs his rookie deal, take a look and see which hand he’s holding the pen with.
“If a guy is right handed, his right side is the dominant side. And, so, therefore, now you’re on the left side, and you’re setting out to the left, which is not your dominant side,” Scarnecchia said. “It takes some getting used to. You have to train yourself to deal with those things, and deal with superior pass rushers in the process. So I think it’s a combination of both those things that make it so hard and put left tackle skills to a premium.”
Why would the Patriots make a change in their front office after trusting the people who are there to run the draft and choose? Does not make sense to me — Tim E.
It doesn’t make sense to me either, which is why I think this is still going to be Eliot Wolf’s front office when the dust settles. This doesn’t feel like a real search, and people around the league also seem to feel that way, given how many are declining to interview.
Even beyond the draft, it’s worth noting that they only recently signed Wolf’s right-hand man Alonzo Highsmith — who came to Foxborough to work with him — so it’d be bewildering if they pivoted to somebody else now.
With final say in free agency and the draft, Wolf set the Patriots franchise on a new course. It’ll be foolish to remove him from power before seeing how it plays out.
