As if the season couldn’t get any uglier for the New England Patriots, the team reached a new low on Wednesday after the Pro Bowl rosters were announced.
For the past 23 years, the Patriots have had at least one player make it to the Super Bowl. They definitely benefited a lot from having Tom Brady, who made the Pro Bowl 14 times in his 20-year stint with the team. Nonetheless, their tremendous success over the years saw plenty of their players other than Brady represent the AFC in the annual festivity.
This 2023 season, however, no Patriot was selected for the Pro Bowl. They are one of only four teams to not have a Pro Bowler this season, along with other bottom-feeders in the Carolina Panthers and Washington Commanders, and a team that has been up-and-down in the Green Bay Packers.
With that, the Patriots also broke their 23-year streak of having at least one Pro Bowler. The last time it happened was back in 2000.
“The Patriots don’t have a single Pro Bowl player. That hasn’t happened since the 2000 season,” Mark Daniels of MassLive confirmed.
To be fair, though, no one on the New England Patriots deserves to be in the Pro Bowl anyway. Not with a 4-12 record and one of the worst offenses in the league. Sure, the Pats have one of the better defenses in the league–they are actually sixth on total defense, per Fox Sports–but it obviously didn’t result in wins.
While it’s definitely sad to see the current state of the Patriots, they can only blame themselves. They have had plenty of chances to improve, but they haven’t been great at roster building since Brady’s departure in 2020.
What’s Next for New England Patriots?
With the New England Patriots out of the playoffs and having nothing left to play for entering Week 18 of the season, they can already focus on the next steps in their rebuild.
The biggest question for them now is the future of head coach Bill Belichick, who has been the subject of several firing rumors amid another season of adversity.
There have been a lot of talks about Belichick being fired after the campaign, but by the looks of it, nothing is certain yet and the Patriots have yet to decide what to do with him.
After handling the Belichick situation, though, the next order of business for New England is finding their next franchise QB. The Mac Jones experiment didn’t work, and while they still have Bailey Zappe, it doesn’t look the Pats have a lot of belief in him.
It remains to be seen what New England will opt to do, but if they want to make the playoffs next season and have players make it to the Pro Bowl, changes certainly need to be made.
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