Every year, the NFL Draft media complex whips us all into a frenzy that has us convinced each draft pick will either be your team’s savior or is the final nail in the coffin for a failed front office.
As a reminder to myself ahead of draft night, I wanted to post my own list of reminders that keep me grounded and sane when the New England Patriots are on the clock.
1. You get players for four years
In the heat of the moment, it is easy to forget this basic truth about the draft: all players sign a four-year contract, with the team
option for a fifth year for players in the first round. It is easy to fight last year’s battles, especially when your team is fresh off a Super Bowl loss. Some prospects might seem like exactly the player we needed in February who could have made the difference in that game. But it is important to remember that the draft is about fighting next year’s battles, not looking backward.
Ideally, the players the Patriots draft in 2026 will develop into players who are playing their best football in 2027, 2028, or 2029. For some context, let’s take a look at the positional breakdown of players the Patriots have under contract in 2028:
Of the 19 Patriots under contract in 2028, ten are members of the 2025 draft class and five more were signed in free agency this offseason. The remaining players include three Patriots draft picks who signed extensions (Marcus Jones, Christian Barmore, and Rhamondre Stevenson) and one member of the 2025 free agent class (Milton Williams). All are financially expendable except for Will Campbell and TreVeyon Henderson. This list does not yet include Drake Maye or Christian Gonzalez, but it is fair to assume both will eventually be included.
This is the composition of the roster when the players drafted this year should be reaching peak performance: essentially a blank slate. While there are immediate needs for the Patriots to fill, over the course of the length of a rookie contract, most positions are of some need to the team. In what is considered a weaker draft class, there’s a chance New England doesn’t make a single selection in this draft with prospects on the board who they believe would make a significant difference as rookies.
Drafting players who fit the needs of the 2026 Patriots is still very important, but Mike Vrabel and Eliot Wolf must also select players they think can fit in down the line.
2. You get first dibs at re-signing players
Just because you get players for four years on their rookie deals doesn’t mean their value ends there. Teams can begin negotiating contract extensions with players they drafted after their third season in the league, giving you an extra year to negotiate a deal before that player hits the open market. Being able to sign players earlier typically means you can get them for cheaper, and you can retain the kinds of premier talent that rarely hits the market.
Drafting a great player in 2026 means that you get them through the 2029 season at a minimum, with the fifth-year option applicable in 2030 if they were taken in the first round and the franchise tag as an option regardless. The Patriots can sign that player to a four-year extension, for example, after the 2028 season that would keep them in Foxboro through 2033.
Get a pick right in 2026, and that player could still be a significant factor for the Patriots when Drake Maye is 31 years old.
This is where positional value can be a big factor in the draft: not all positions have the same kind of longevity, so the value you get on having first dibs at re-signing a player varies from position to position and skill-set to skill-set. The production you might see from an edge rusher on his second contract is different from the impact a running back may bring, for example.
3. The roster is functionally 70 players large
In the modern NFL, the active roster features 53 players. However, recent rule changes have expanded the practice squad to 17 players and allowed for players on it to be activated on game day. Functionally, that allows NFL teams to keep 70 players in-house for coaching, development, and use in games. Assembling a roster means filling it out to the 90 players allowed in training camp and then refining it to the 70 kept during the season, typically while churning the bottom five to ten players looking for new talent or shifting depth to in-season needs.
When franchises are selecting players in the draft in April, this is something that must be kept in mind. These depth and development roles allow players to be kept around for longer to be groomed for an important role on game day. Players selected on day three of the draft may not serve much use as rookies, but if they show enough early, they can stick around at the bottom of the active roster or on the practice squad for multiple seasons before developing into a role that may not have existed on the roster this April.
Take Marcus Cannon, for example. He was drafted in the fifth round in 2011 after a cancer diagnosis made his football future uncertain, and there were questions on what position he would play at the NFL level. The Patriots announced him as a guard. Through his first five seasons in the NFL, Cannon bounced around as a backup between four different spots on the line, never finding a permanent home. Then, with Sebastian Vollmer missing all of 2016 with an injury, he won the starting right tackle job and was named second-team All-Pro for the Super Bowl champions.
Cannon is just one example of this. More famous ones include Tom Brady, drafted with Drew Bledsoe already signed long term, and Julian Edelman, drafted with Randy Moss and Wes Welker already on the roster. The combination of massive rosters with the ever-changing long-term projections of a franchise gives plenty of room for developmental or depth pieces across the board.
4. Know what you don’t know
The NFL Draft Media Complex will have you convinced every April that every player that goes in the top 10 will be in the Hall of Fame and every player taken in the first round will make the Pro Bowl.
That’s a lie.
Players from the 2021 draft have had five full seasons in the NFL. Of the 32 players selected in the first round, just ten have been selected to a Pro Bowl. Of those, just six have made multiple Pro Bowls. Four have been selected first team All-Pro.
The numbers for the 2022 first round are similar. Eight Pro Bowlers, six who have been multiple times. Four first team All-Pro players.
Even in the first round, the odds of drafting a player who adds little to no value to your team are similar to finding one who competes at the top of their position. Winning championships is the end goal in football, so finding some of those very few who are among the best of what they do is important. Avoiding the players who don’t help you at all may be even more important.
Don’t be too certain in advance that any specific player is the one the Patriots absolutely need to take. History tells us that the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars invested by NFL teams into getting these picks right won’t get you to that level of accuracy in predicting which players will succeed and which won’t. It’s important to remember what we’re looking at here: the goal is to predict the future of 20- to 24-year old men based on a limited sample size, projecting them into new roles with new organizations while they have to navigate what it is like to be a professional off the field and handle new problems at a faster speed with higher standards on it. On top of that comes injury risk from playing such a physical game, plus the turmoil of changing rosters, coaches, and schemes, in a league where many organizations have no coherent vision or leadership.
There are just too many variables to know for sure if any pick that was made is the right one on draft night, and it is wise to calibrate your judgement accordingly.
(That said, if your team is reaching to take a player who wasn’t projected to go until rounds later, that is probably grounds for freaking out. That’s a risk that doesn’t usually pay off.)
