The Patriots seem to have hit on Kyle Dugger and Josh Uche, and Michael Onwenu might have been the biggest steal of last year’s draft.
The jury still is very much out on the rest of New England’s 2020 class, however.
Save for Dugger and Uche, no Patriots rookie made much of an impact this past season. In fact, two of the 10 players New England selected last spring never made their way onto the team’s 53-man roster. One of those players, kicker Justin Rohrwasser, was one of the most puzzling picks of the 2020 draft, and the Patriots ended up looking pretty foolish for selecting him in the fifth round.
ESPN’s Mike Reiss believes Rohrwasser could use a fresh start more so than any other player in the Patriots organization.
“After the Patriots selected him in the fifth round of the 2020 draft, making him the first kicker picked overall, Rohrwasser didn’t make it out of training camp as veteran Nick Folk was signed to take his place,” Reiss wrote in a column published Monday to ESPN.com. “Rohrwasser, who generated headlines because of a tattoo from his days at Marshall University, spent the entire season on the practice squad, and now faces additional competition from the late-season signing of Roberto Aguayo. It looks like a potentially ominous situation for him.”
Rohrwasser was viewed as a lock to serve as the Patriots’ 2020 kicker when Bill Belichick and Co. made him the first player selected at the position last year. But the Marshall product was so shaky in training camp that New England felt inclined to bring back Folk, a 36-year-old who in 2019 split time between the Patriots and the Arizona Hotshots of the now-defunct Alliance of American Football.
Folk went on to have an impressive 2020 campaign, which included a handful of clutch, long-range field goals. His slate should motivate the Patriots to re-sign him this offseason, and if he returns to Foxboro, he’ll undoubtedly enter training camp as the favorite to land the kicking job.
Rohrwasser probably would have to blow coaches away this summer in order to have a future in New England, and there’s been nothing to suggest he’s capable of doing that.
