Who will lead the Patriots in receiving yards this year?

With the Patriots’ pass-catching group as mysterious and convoluted as ever, who are the top candidates to lead the team in receiving yards this season?

There’s an ancient proverb from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus that essentially states “the only constant in life is change.”

Such is the case with the New England Patriots offense. While the defense has largely looked the same and operated under the same guiding principles during the Bill Belichick era, the offense has constantly been on the move, morphing and transitioning from year to year – and often even from week to week.

It’s part of what makes the Patriots such a notoriously difficult team to game plan for. One week they hand off the ball and run it for 300 yards. The next week, it’s death-by-a-thousand-cuts with Tom Brady dinking and dunking for three yards here, another first down there. And then out of nowhere, offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels and Brady party like it’s 2007 again, and suddenly the 41-year-old QB is heaving the football all up and down the field one week.

This formula has worked for New England offensively for decades now, so there’s really no reason to think that suddenly the wheels are going to come off just because of the personnel losses this offseason. Yes, they are more notable than perhaps any other offseason in recent memory – there’s no sugarcoating Rob Gronkowski’s retirement, in other words – but the odds still favor the Patriots re-inventing their offense and finding a way to make another deep playoff run in 2019.

With that all being said, though, someone has to catch the football for Tom Brady this year… right?

The strength of this year’s Patriots’ O undoubtedly will be its running backs – they’re just that good and that deep. No one’s denying that.

But there will be weeks and games where Sony Michel, Damien Harris, Rex Burkhead, and James White run into a brick wall in the opposing team’s run defense, and when that happens, Brady will need to sip from the Gatorade Fountain of Youth on the sideline and make sure he can back up all the talk he’s doing these days by flinging the ball around the field.

Who will he fling it to the most this year? Well, let’s take a look at the most-likely candidates to finish the regular season as the Pats’ leading receiver:

Honorable Mention – Phillip Dorsett, Braxton Berrios, Maurice Harris