New England Patriots: 3 biggest duds of the 2023 season

One of the Patriots’ biggest issues this season is injuries. They currently have 21 players either on IR or dealing with an injury. From a performance point of view, you can’t play poorly if you’re not playing at all, right?

But who hasn’t been performing at the level they were expected to in 2023?

Biggest dud of 2023 #1: Chad Ryland

Selecting a kicker with a fourth-round pick they had acquired from the Jets was an odd decision in the first place. But it has turned out to look plain bad. The Patriots drafted Ryland 66 picks ahead of Puka Nacua, and 23 before Aidan O’Connell came off the board. And either of those guys would be pretty handy in New England right about now.

In Ryland’s defense, he couldn’t have picked a worse landing spot. The 2023 Patriots have been a nightmare situation for all the rookies. Christian Gonzalez looked like a veteran cornerback at the start of the season but suffered a season-ending injury in Week 4. And an offense that can’t get within field goal range will really hamper any kicker.

It has also meant that any errors he’s made have been magnified. He’s been quite good at kickoffs, though; he averages 63.9 yards per kickoff. That’s fine. 

Drafting a kicker seemed like a move designed to save some money when there were numerous veteran kickers available in free agency. But one with the experience of Robbie Gould or Mason Crosby would have been expensive. But as the old cliche goes, you get what you pay for. 

Ryland hasn’t missed an extra point all season; he’s only had to attempt 14, though. Only Graham Gano has a lower field goal percentage in 2023. Gano only played eight games this season before he succumbed to injury, and with the “help” of a poor Giants offense, he was only able to make 64.6% of the 17 field goals he attempted.

Ryland has played 11 games but only made 66.7% of the 18 he’s attempted. He’s only made 1 of his three attempts from 50+ yards! But that’s not surprising, considering he was three from 6 on 50+ yard attempts in college at Maryland in 2022. An odd draft pick all around.

Biggest dud of 2023 #2: Myles Bryant

Myles Bryant has not had a season to remember. And to be fair, the team probably wasn’t expecting him to play 75% of the defensive snaps this season. Bryant has jumped between the practice squad and the active roster four times in the last two and a half seasons.

But injuries to Marcus Jones, Jonathan Jones, Jack Jones, the aforementioned Christian Gonzalez, Isaiah Bolden, and even J.C Jackson, who missed a game, have made Bryant a mainstay. 

Since Bill Belichick called Bryant “a very dependable player,” he has allowed three touchdown receptions and missed 10% of the tackles he’s been asked to make. He has allowed 80% of the passes thrown his way to be completed and an overall passer rating of 109.7 (a perfect rating would be 158.3, so Bryant is about 70% of the way there). 

Biggest dud of them all in 2023 #3: Bill O'Brien

Finally, the biggest dud has to be the Bill O’Brien offense.

If I told you Tom Brady’s former QB coach (in 2009 when Brady made the Pro Bowl) would take over the Patriots offensive play calling this season and make it worse, you would justifiably think I was drunk. But that’s what has happened.

O’Brien took over from the head coach, a former defensive coordinator, and a former special teams coach who were somehow all trying to call plays into Mac Jones’ headset last season. In 2022, the Patriots scored 32.8% of their drives; that’s down to 22.4% this year!

A large part of the issue is transitioning from the Patriots’ traditional Erhardt-Perkins system to O’Brien’s adapted West Coast system. And a portion of that is Adrian Klemm taking over the coaching of the offensive line.

Nobody would have thought that unit could have regressed after Matt Patricia was relieved of his duties, yet somehow it has.

In 2023 the Patriots averaged 5.3 yards per play; this year, it has decreased to 4.7! The most perplexing part of this whole thing is that O’Brien was in Foxborough between 2007 and 2011, and Klemm was drafted by the Patriots in 2000 and played 26 games as a Patriot. It is a mystery why they have decided to revolutionize something that only needed to be better organized.

And then there's his ego...

O’Brien’s ego has been all too present on the Patriots’ sideline though. He berated Mac Jones so effusively that the young QB has looked traumatized in his post-game interviews.

Despite that Jones has refused to blame the system or anyone else for the offenses many failings during the season. He maintained that he needed to be better, but he isn’t the only one with room for improvement.

O’Brien seems so sure his offense isn’t the problem that he’s stuck to his guns all season. He doesn’t appear to have noticed that Trent Brown is one of the best run-blocking linemen in the NFL.

According to ESPN, only four offensive tackles have a better winning percentage on run blocks. And 2 of the tackles ahead of him play for the Eagles! To maximize that advantage, you’d just run behind the guy winning his blocks, right? Wrong.

The offense has been so inconsistent in 2023 that they haven’t always crossed the threshold required for NextGen to chart it! But in Week 8, all 10 of Rhamondre Stevenson’s carries came between the tackles. In Week 12, 4 of Stevenson’s longest runs were to the outside, but he ran to the outside on 6 of 21 carries.

Helping his quarterback succeed doesn’t seem to be something O’Brien is particularly interested in either. In 2022, Jones's most successful passes were deep over the middle and to receivers on intermediate routes to the right of the formation. His weakest area was intermediate routes to the left of the formation. Inexplicably, this season, O’Brien has had him throw a significant number of passes to receivers in that area.  

That’s one of the reasons screen passes haven’t really worked. Well, that and the left tackle is one of the best run blockers in the league.

The chances of 370 lbs of Trent Brown getting out in front of Demario Douglas are pretty skinny (unlike Trent). Against the Giants in Week 12, they threw 12 screen passes, and while Patriots.com try to polish that hot mess by saying 6 of them worked, 6 of them obviously didn’t. One screen pass ended with a five-yard loss!

And the Patriots site explains this by saying that left guard Cole Strange isn’t great at blocking on screen passes; he’s not the only one. But O’Brien keeps calling them.