The 2026 season will be a different one for the New England Patriots. Mike Vrabel's team will face a much more challenging schedule than the powderpuff one they rolled over in 2025.
NFL observers are widely predicting their demise, and one from Yahoo Sports, Frank Schwab, names them and the Bears as having the best chances at not repeating as Division champions.
Those naysaying predictions, while an irritant to Patriot Nation, are not far-fetched. The Patriots did have an easy schedule in 2025, and they did what good teams do against inferior opponents: they beat them, nearly all of them. But it's on to 2026, and the lay of the land in Foxborough has changed.
After being blown out by the Seahawks, who exposed all their flaws to the world, the offseason game was to improve. And the two most pressing needs were in sack prevention and sack production. How well they do so will determine whether they'll be up to the challenge of 2026's arduous schedule.
The Patriots are expected to have a difficult time replicating their 2025 success this upcoming season
Being outsacked 6-1 in the Super Bowl while also surrendering three offensive turnovers is a prescription for disaster in any game, never mind against the best team in the NFL. Advanced metrics and statistics can be floated all around Foxborough, but the reality is that the Super Bowl and the season were lost as a result of those two factors. And the prime culprit was the offensive line.
Schwab writes that the Patriots' strength of schedule will mean they are a candidate to regress in 2026. He's spot on, they are.
"We all know about last season’s strength of schedule for the Patriots, which was one of the easiest in recent NFL history. And if that was the only thing working against the Patriots, who went 14-3 last season, it would be significant but maybe not too much to overcome. That’s not the only reason. The Patriots were the luckiest team in the NFL last season when it came to adjusted games lost due to injury, a metric from FTN Fantasy’s Aaron Schatz.
That was a massive advantage and very hard to repeat. Seven wins in games decided by seven points or less is also going to be hard to repeat. New England had a great season and has a young core, with a quarterback in Drake Maye who nearly won NFL MVP and should still be improving. But a pullback is practically inevitable, it’s just a matter of how many fewer wins the Patriots get."
Schwab makes some good points, and the schedule argument is hard to argue. The imperative for Mike Vrabel and the Patriots was to address the sack issue head-on this offseason. They did, to some extent, but perhaps not enough to make a material difference.
For more protection on the offensive line, they added Alijah Vera-Tucker in free agency. He's solid when he's not injured, but unfortunately, in his five-year career, he's missed numerous games, including all 17 in 2025. It was a risky and less-than-optimum signing on your second-most-important unit after the quarterback.
The Patriots will also move Jared Wilson, who played left guard in 2025, back to center, his last college position at Georgia. Wilson hasn't played any center in the NFL. Again, that's a risky proposition for a team that surrendered 47 regular-season sacks and another 21 in the postseason.
On the plus side, they did add a top left tackle, Caleb Lomu, in the draft. He may have to be the first guy off the bench at any of the four non-center positions on the offensive line.
In sack production, the team swapped free agent K'Lavon Chaisson for Dre'Mont Jones. There was no gain there, but they did draft a superb sack-producer in Illinois' Gabe Jacas. He adds to Jones and last season's other incumbent edge, Harold Landry III, who was injured in 2025. It's an incremental gain, but they should still add a veteran edge to augment that group.
With those factors in mind, it's not a reach for Schwab to suggest that the Patriots will likely regress record-wise in 2026. The NFL has built its salary cap, draft, and scheduling to achieve parity. Yet, what these negative suggestions should do is fuel the competitive instincts in a Patriots team that came within one game of winning it all.
When you have Drake Maye as your quarterback and maybe A.J. Brown to catch his passes, expect that anything is possible.
Add us as a preferred source on Google