The Patriots have taken care of some important business with their rookie class.
New England has signed first-round pick Caleb Lomu, the team announced on Monday.
Lomu, an offensive tackle, was selected out of Utah with the No. 28 overall pick in April. The Patriots traded up to get him, giving up the No. 31 overall pick and a fourth-round pick to the Bills for the selection.
With Will Campbell on the left side, Lomu is expected to slot in at right tackle for the Patriots.
New England now has just one remaining unsigned pick, second-round linebacker Gabe Jacas.
The best way for the circus to make money is when the circus isn’t in town. In American sports, no league has mastered that reality like the NFL.
From the Super Bowl to Week 1, the league has developed many ways to attract attention and drive interest when it’s not football season. Prior to 2006, June 1 was the occasion for a fresh wave of free agency. In 2026, June 1 made a major comeback.
The trades of defensive end Myles Garrett, defensive end Jared Verse, and receiver A.J. Brown made it a big week for the NFL. And it raises the question of whether the league and its teams will further embrace the possibility of making deals on June 1 in the future.
It’s a point raised at the tail end of an article from ESPN reviewing the trades that happened last Monday.
“I think the league will [lean into] the June 1 thing,” an unnamed AFC executive told ESPN. “It’s the summer, it’s slow, and these deals are good engagement for the league.”
They also need to be good for the teams involved, and the primary benefit for the seller comes from trading bloated contracts in the hopes of reducing the cap consequences in the current year. That’s why June 1 used to be a major date for free agency; before teams could release up to two veterans with a post-June 1 designation in March, they had to hold the contracts until June in order to spread the dead money over two years.
But if teams are willing to move highly-paid veterans — and if other teams are willing to give up significant compensation to get them — June 1 can become yet another date to circle, every year. And, yes, at some level, the NFL wants to have more tentpole events at a time when the three-ring circus is in mothballs.
After the Browns proposed expanding the universe of future picks that could be traded from three years to five (and the Rams coincidentally agreed), Rams president Kevin Demoff said, “Nothing creates more interest in the NFL than trades. This is why Cleveland’s proposal to allow teams to trade picks up to 5 years out as opposed to 3 years out makes so much sense. More picks to trade = more trades = more interest & team building options.”
The option of building a team and generating interest with June 1 trades has been hiding in plain sight, for years. In 2026, the NFL got a taste of what that day could become, if the trend continues.
Patriots left tackle Will Campbell had an up-and-down rookie season in 2025, and it ended on a down note when he struggled mightily in New England’s Super Bowl loss. Campbell believes his future has a lot more ups than downs.
Campbell noted that he was drafted at age 21 after playing three seasons at LSU, and he believes he can get a lot better.
“I’m 22, so I’m a long way from where I’m going to be in the future. It’s not like I’m great at everything and here’s one little thing [to work on]. I’m trying to make everything as a whole better,” Campbell said, via Mike Reiss of ESPN.
Campbell suffered an MCL sprain in Week 12 of last season and missed five games, and in the playoffs he looked like he might not have been fully healed. He said his physical therapy this offseason has strengthened his knee. And strengthened his prospects of becoming the player the Patriots thought they were getting with the fourth overall pick last year.
From Thursday afternoon until Saturday morning, I partially unplugged for the wedding of my niece. I’m back in the saddle, and I was taken aback by something that became a thing on Thursday.
It became a given in multiple media circles — from those who have a history of warping reality for engagement (like “Dov Kleiman,” who isn’t really Dov Kleiman but whoever it was that bought Kleiman’s Twitter account more than two years ago) to those who know or should know better (like former ESPN personality Trey Wingo).
Both “Kleiman” and Wingo (and more than a few others) claimed that Patriots receiver A.J. Brown, during his recent interview with Maria Taylor, admitted that he “leaked” stories to the media in an effort to motivate the Eagles.
Brown never said that. Allow me to repeat this, with emphasis: BROWN NEVER SAID THAT.
Here’s the key exchange in the interview. Maria Taylor asked Brown if he felt that the picture painted of Brown in Philly made him out to be a villain.
“I wouldn’t say ‘a villain,’ because some of the things that was done, it was done purposely to give us a push, you know?” Brown said. “I know if I said something in the media, I know it’s gonna propel us to work on it, because now everybody’s talking about it. You know, so it’s like are we gonna really — are we gonna fix it or not? We can’t keep saying, ‘It’s the standard, it’s the standard.’ And we’re not trying to truly get better.
“I’m not saying that we weren’t, but I know if you say what you need to say in the media — which I won’t do that anymore — but it gives everything legs, and legs . . . to push everybody to be better. Because pressure isn’t always a bad thing. It can also be a good thing, too. It just depends on how you look at it. And we had guys in the locker room — which was, honestly, I feel like it was OK to do because we had guys and a lot of them who were men you know, and it’s like, yeah, ‘I know I need to do this. I need to do that,’ including myself.
“So you felt like basically some of the things you would say in the media in ways were a strategy in hopes of helping your team become the best version of themselves?” Taylor said.
“Nothing I would say was for personal gain,” Brown said. “It was always to help the team win, and try to be our better self.”
One of the best examples of that dynamic happened in November, when Brown addressed at his locker the Twitch stream comment to “get rid of me” from your fantasy team.
“We can’t just keep slapping a Band-Aid over the defense doing their job and getting us out of trouble,” Brown told reporters the next day. “At what point are we going to pick up our slack as an offense that we say we’re so great? . . . And that’s what I’m getting at. It’s not about, ‘I don’t care about winning, all I care about is stats.’ No. It’s been week after week sometimes we’re not contributing, we’re not doing our job on offense. You can’t keep slapping a Band-Aid over that and expect to win late in the year and think you’re going to go to that at the end of the year. It’s not going to fucking happen.”
At the time, our position was that Brown was sufficiently selfless in his desire for the offense to improve that he was willing to be labeled as selfish regarding comments that many viewed as the same-old gripes from a diva receiver who wants the quarterback to just give him the damn ball.
The message went beyond Brown’s stats. The offense wasn’t growing. It wasn’t evolving. It was hiding behind the fact that the Eagles were winning games, thanks in large part to their defense. (Two days earlier, the Eagles had scored only 10 points in a victory at Green Bay.)
Brown’s concern was that, if the offense didn’t get better, it would lose when it counted. And he was right — the Eagles couldn’t score against the 49ers with the season on the line in the wild-card round of the playoffs, thanks to the ill-advised decision (reportedly suggested by quarterback Jalen Hurts) to run “four verticals” for the second straight play.
The moment underscored the offense’s failure to grow and adapt. That’s the concern Brown accurately expressed in November. And he said it on the record. He didn’t “leak” anything.
Most importantly, Brown never told Maria Taylor that he leaked stories to the media to motivate teammates. Brown didn’t operate in the shadows. He stood in the spotlight and said what he needed to say.
It’s a huge difference. The notion that Brown “leaked” stories creates the impression that he was violating the code of the locker room, that he was going rogue and potentially sabotaging the team.
Everyone who claimed based on the actual interview — or who amplified the contention without checking an interview that is available for anyone to watch on YouTube — should revise their tweets and their stories. In the end, a surprising number of outlets ran with the false characterization of Brown’s comments.
It’s sloppy. It’s lazy. It’s wrong. And it continues, for as long as the tweets and links claiming Brown “leaked” stories are not revised or deleted.
Let’s see how many, if any, of these outlets will now do the right thing.
Last year, Drake Maye was an MVP candidate in his first season in Josh McDaniels’ offense. This year, McDaniels thinks Maye can be even better.
McDaniels said Maye is showing at offseason workouts that he has a firm grasp of the offense, whereas last year at this time, he was just learning McDaniels’ system. That makes a big difference.
“This offseason is different than last,” McDaniels said. “Last offseason, we were just getting to know the language and learning how to operate within a system of offensive football. This year, we’re trying to take that and then go to the next phase of that, the next level of that, in his case which is obviously playing the position of quarterback. He knows a hell of a lot more than he did last year at this time. He’s trying to either really turn the corner and perfect some things that he has an opportunity to do that with, or trying to learn a few new things and evolve as a player and as an offense. He’s had a great attitude. Super fun to be around every day. Fun like he was last year, but it’s a more accelerated version.”
With the addition of A.J. Brown adding a big weapon to the passing game, there’s every reason for the Patriots to be optimistic that Maye can be an MVP candidate again. McDaniels is liking what he’s seeing.
