New England Patriots: Trust your rookie tight ends

New England Patriots should not waste money on a marginal tight end but should trust their scouting staff who suggested drafting two rookie tight ends.

Rumors are circling that the New England Patriots may be looking at a 36-year old veteran tight end in light of the opting-out of Matt LaCosse from this season.

Simply said – they should scrap this idea entirely. Last season, the Patriots signed a 39-year old tight end to anchor their tight end room. Poor decision.

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Now, it is rumored that they may sign a 35-year old guy to try to similarly fill this position. A simple suggestion is this – don’t do it. This stop-gap approach doesn’t work.

It’s a poor approach to team-building and it should be dismissed as malarkey forthwith. You think New England would have learned this lesson by now.

Since Rob Gronkowski departed, the Patriots have floundered around trying to replace or even find a reasonable facsimile of a tight end to try to make up for some of Gronk’s production. It has been a dismal failure.

Now it seems, they are trying to fish around again for an aging veteran with all kinds of injury issues to somehow fill that void. The simple answer is this, don’t do it. But there they go again in the case of New England’s search for a tight end who can do, well, anything at all.

The draft investment was high.

The Patriots since they drafted Gronk have invested little in a tight end to possibly replace him in light of his severe injury history. Until now. That changed earlier this year in the 2020 NFL draft.

For the first time in nearly a decade, New England actually decided to draft two tight ends high in the draft, third round to be exact. And not only that, they traded up for both. And one trade was with the Jets. Shame!

Nevertheless, the scouting staff and the football management team signed off on this huge investment in two young tight ends in April. They were Devin Asiasi of UCLA and Dalton Keene of Virginia Tech. That’s a lot of high draft capital spent on two players at the same position.

But, that notwithstanding, why aren’t the Patriots allowing these high picks to just take charge of that position for the 2020 team? They invested heavily in these players, trading multiple picks to move up to get them. Why not just let them go out and justify the confidence the team placed in them?

The strategy of trying to fill a position by plugging in an older, injured player just doesn’t work. It hasn’t and it won’t for New England in 2020 either. It’s time to just trust your scouting staff and trust your decisionmaking in the draft picks you select. Let Asiasi and Keene play. And let’s see how they do.