Ranking Of NFL’s Top Young Talent Troubling Reminder For Patriots

The Patriots are rebuilding. There's no doubting as much at this point.

New England enters the 2024 season with pretty low expectations. The Patriots aren't projected to win many games, and there's not much chatter about a deep playoff run emanating from players, coaches, executives or owners down in Foxboro, Mass.

Right now, the Patriots are in the middle of that rebuilding process, and the thing that will be on trial in 2024 is just how far along they are. We won't know for sure until the games start to matter again, but a troubling piece of content Wednesday served as yet another reminder of just how much work New England still has to do.

The Athletic's Mike Jones as part of the site's league preview ranked the NFL's top 25 players under 25. While the exercise itself is inherently arbitrary, Jones did survey "12 league front-office members, coaches or scouts for their thoughts," giving the power brokers a list of 35 players and asking them for feedback on rankings. One other important tidbit: "Any player who met our age qualification and had earned All-Rookie, All-Pro or Pro Bowl honors was included for consideration."

That criteria alone should be a dead giveaway for how many Patriots made the list. That number, of course, would be zero. Again, that's not too hard to figure out, considering New England didn't earn a single Pro Bowl selection in 2023. The Patriots did have a Pro Bowler in 2022. That was defensive end Matthew Judon, who is a very good football player, but he turns 32 on Thursday and might not be rocking the Flying Elvis for much longer anyway.

(And, in the interest of fairness, Marcus Jones was a First-Team All-Pro selection in 2022 as a punt returner. But he's also older than 25 and would have had zero chance of knocking any of these players off the list.)

This revelation shouldn't be surprising to anyone. The Patriots have a flawed roster, bereft of game-changing talent at any age. Yet it should serve as a troubling reminder, especially in a salary-cap league, that the best teams are the ones that can identify and potentially retain young talent. The best teams put those players in a position to succeed and thrive early, and they ideally build talented rosters around them. It's pretty elementary.

Nineteen of the 25 players who made the list currently play for teams that, according to FanDuel Sportsbook, have better than 25-1 odds to win the Super Bowl. If you want to play important games in the modern NFL, you need young talent.

Perhaps the Patriots are making slight progress in that regard. Christian Gonzalez ranked sixth among all cornerbacks in Pro Football Focus grading through his first three games last season before going down with an injury. He could certainly be on this list next year. If rookie receiver Ja'Lynn Polk is better than expected, could he crack the list similar to Puka Nacua after his breakout first season in 2023? Then there's rookie quarterback Drake Maye, who is just 21 and could find himself on this list multiple times -- if the Patriots take care of business around him.

That remains the biggest question mark, though, and while this sort of ranking does add context, it's also not really needed to affirm that thought.