UPDATE (10:45 a.m. ET): Robert Kraft has weighed in on the Patriots’ 2022 performance in an email to season-ticket holders, promising “critical evaluation of our football operation.” You can read the entire message here.
ORIGINAL STORY: At what point does Robert Kraft start to lose patience — and trust — with the way Bill Belichick is running the Patriots?
New England will be on the outside looking in when the NFL playoffs kick off this weekend after losing Sunday in Buffalo. It’s the second time in the last three seasons that the Patriots missed the playoffs, and their lone berth — sneaking into the wild-card round last season — ended with a 30-point loss to the Bills.
It’s almost hard to believe, but the Patriots haven’t won a playoff game since Super Bowl LIII.
It might be a while before Kraft publicly weighs in on another lost season in Foxboro, but if his past comments are any indication, he can’t be happy. Obviously, any season that ends without a playoff game let alone a playoff win isn’t going to sit well with most owners, but Kraft raised the stakes last March when he lamented New England’s recent lack of success in January.
“I’m a Patriot fan big-time, first, and more than anything,” Kraft told reporters at the owners meetings, “it bothers me that we haven’t been able to win a playoff game in the last three years.”
Well, now three years is set to become four years, and things are trending in the wrong direction.
Kraft was willing to let Belichick do things his way this past offseason. That’s how New England made the head-scratching decision to replace the departing Josh McDaniels at offensive coordinator with a combination of Matt Patricia and Joe Judge. Seemingly everyone outside of Gillette Stadium knew there was a chance it would fail spectacularly.
Even Kraft expressed some skepticism publicly, ultimately admitting Belichick had earned the right to not just go outside the box, but launch himself into another area code from the box.
“I think Bill has a unique way of doing things,” Kraft said in March. “It’s worked out pretty well up to now. I know what I don’t know and I try to stay out of the way of things I don’t know. I think he’s pretty good — over 40 years of experience doing it. It doesn’t look like ‘straight line’ to our fans, or to myself, but I’m results-oriented.”
The Patriots went 8-9, missed the playoffs, ranked 26th in offensive DVOA, ranked last in red-zone offense, 27th in third-down offense and saw their first-round pick quarterback take a sizable step backward in his ever-important second season.
Not exactly the results Kraft was looking for.
Whether he holds Belichick to that decree and just how he goes about doing it is obviously the biggest storyline of the Patriots’ offseason. The blind faith in Belichick has to be dwindling, though.
There’s no reason to believe Kraft will sit idly by. In 2021, he chirped Belichick for his draft failures, saying he didn’t feel “we’ve done the greatest job the last few years, and I really hope, and I believe, I’ve seen a different approach this year.”
That all coincided with Matt Groh becoming more involved with the draft process, and what do you know, the Patriots had two good drafts in a row.
“I think we had a great draft last year and made up for what happened the previous four years or so,” Kraft said this past March.
The 81-year-old Kraft almost certainly will be ready to shake some trees this offseason. After spending big in 2021 and watching Belichick’s grand experiment flop in 2022, it’s a safe assumption things will look quite different on the New England sideline in 2023.
