The New England Patriots were in desperate need of help in the passing game this offseason, and N'Keal Harry might give it to them.
Tight end Rob Gronkowski had announced his retirement and wide receiver Cordarrelle Patterson departed via free agency. On top of that, wideout Josh Gordon is serving an indefinite suspension for violating the terms of his conditional reinstatement.
So, going into the NFL Draft, everyone had a feeling that the Patriots would look to draft a receiver, but the feeling certainly wasn't familiar.
Of course, New England did ultimately end up taking a wide receiver, selecting Arizona State's N'Keal Harry with the last pick of the first round on Thursday night, but it marked the first time that the Pats had taken a wide out in the opening round of the draft in the Bill Belichick era, as Tyler Sullivan of 247 Sports points out.
As a matter of fact, the last time the Patriots used a first-round pick on a wide receiver was all the way back in 1996, when New England took the late Terry Glenn with the seventh overall selection.
But Pats director of player personnel Nick Caserio says that the fact that the franchise had not drafted a receiver in the first round in 23 years means absolutely nothing:
“We’re not concerned about what’s happened in the past,” said Caserio. “We look at the players across this year’s board and we stack the players obviously horizontally and vertically and then we work across, so it’s the same thing we did with Sony [Michel] last year. We drafted Sony at the bottom of the first round. So, he was a good player, a highly-graded player, so relative to the options we were looking at, that was the choice that we made. Whatever happens in the past really has no bearing because it has no relevance to this year.”
Whatever the Patriots are doing, it is obviously working, because they have won six Super Bowls over the last 17 years.
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