Patriots Offensive Infrastructure Ranking Revealed
The New England Patriots are in their own category of bad, at least for now, when it comes to the offensive side of the ball.
CBS Sports' Jared Dublin ranked every team in the league by tiers when it comes to offensive infrastructure, and the Patriots ended on their own tier in dead last.
Cred: USA TODAY Sports Images
Dublin's grading scale was described as the following:
We once again used a weighted grading system where each team was given a 1-5 rating (1 = terrible, 3 = average, 5 = elite) in the following areas: Quarterback, Play-Caller (head coach and/or offensive coordinator), Offensive Line, Pass-Catchers (WR/TE), and Running Backs. Those scores were then weighted so that the quarterback was the most important component of the offense, followed by play-caller, offensive line, and pass-catchers, and then finally running backs, so that the weights reflected as closely as possible the reality of the way modern NFL offenses work.
He also qualified that the rankings were not necessarily a predictor of future success but rather what has the group done to this point.
He gave the Patriots a 2.5 for quarterback, a 3 for play caller, a 2.5 for offensive line, a 2 for pass catchers, and a 3.5 for running backs leading to a weighted score of 2.57.
His reasoning was as follows:
There was quite a bit of separation between New England at the bottom and the next-closest team, so we had to put the Patriots in their own tier. We assumed Jacoby Brissett would be the team's starter to begin the season, which seems reasonable as the team will likely want to bring Drake Maye along slowly due to the lacking supporting cast the Pats have at the moment.
Given that almost everything with regards to the offense is new, the Pats will hope to end up much higher on the list at the end of the year than at the start of the year.
In this case, however, things can really only go up from here.