On Friday, the Patriots held their ninth practice of the training camp season, taking the field inside Gillette Stadium for a special intrasquad scrimmage in front of season ticket holders and members of the Foxborough community.
About an hour before the scrimmage got underway, head coach Mike Vrabel met with the media for his regular pre-practice press conference, and was asked about the much discussed trade requests of Commanders wide receiver Terry McLaurin and Cowboys edge rusher Micah Parsons.
“Two high-profile players have made trade requests from their teams, one being Terry McLaurin, the other being Micah Parsons,” MassLive’s Karen Guregian said to lead off Vrabel’s press conference. “Should their respective teams honor those trade requests, might you kick the tires?”
“Karen - I’m not going to comment on players that are under contract on other teams,” said Vrabel. “Let’s focus on the ones that are here that we’re working with.
“I mean, we see all these things happen in the National Football League, whether it’s the offseason, whether it’s before the season starts. So, everybody’s working with different situations, so those respective players and respective teams will focus on their situations, and we’ll focus on ours.”
While the 49-year-old was dismissive of Guregian’s question, it was ultimately fair game given this line of questioning to Vrabel from June 10 during minicamp:
Tom E. Curran: “How do you feel about your roster right now? Are there any areas where you look at it and say, ‘Man, that’s a glaring spot; we could use more competition or more depth?’”
Mike Vrabel: “I think that should go for every position on a roster. We would always want to do that, I think. Trying to always continually make the roster more competitive and trying to find everybody that can continually help us from now until the end of the season. I think that just has to go on. That has to happen. Whether that does or not, I don't know. It's not going to keep us from looking, trying to bring up ideas or players, or how we acquire players between now and the end of the season.”
TEC: “Part of the reason I ask that is there's always, at this time across the league, a number of guys who might be in whatever kind of contract strife or on the trading block. So to not speak about them specifically, would you guys constantly be monitoring all discussions?”
MV: “I think that we have to. It would go for the ability to acquire good players, good people that feel like they can help us at any position. I don't know what those situations are throughout the league, but I'm all for trying to make the roster better any chance that we can.”
Fast forward to Friday, and you have two of the best players in the NFL requesting trades just weeks before the season gets underway.
Both of them, obviously, would make Vrabel’s team better.
McLaurin is among the most underrated players at his position in the league, and would immediately vault to the No.1 receiver slot next to former All-Pro Stefon Diggs. He’s 29 years old, and is coming off a season where he was named a second-team All-Pro while playing for a team that lost in the NFC Championship Game to the eventual Super Bowl champions. As Jayden Daniels’ favorite target, he was a huge part of the reason Washington made such a remarkable year-over-year improvement from 2023 (4-13) to 2024 (12-5).
Parsons is arguably the best player at his position in the NFL, and that’s saying something given how many elite edge rushers there are in the game right now. At only 26 years old, his best football still could be ahead of him, despite being named an All-Pro in each of his first three seasons in the league. And despite missing four games in 2024, he still managed to make his fourth consecutive Pro Bowl. While edge rusher isn’t exactly a massive need for the Patriots, adding a generational talent like Parsons is a no-brainer for 31 teams outside of Dallas.
Both McLaurin and Parsons have sizable cap hits for the 2025 season, with the receiver accounting for $25.5 million and the edge rusher accounting for $24 million. But with New England sitting with a league-leading $60.6 million remaining in cap space, the Patriots could take on both contracts with room to spare.
After shutting down Guregian’s question about McLaurin and Parsons to open his press conference on Friday, this sizable cap space was acknowledged in an immediate follow-up.
“You guys do still have the most amount of salary cap space in the league,” said The Boston Globe’s Nicole Yang. “Just how do you view that level of flexibility at this stage in the season?”
“If something were to present itself that we would be able to do some things - so, right now we’re focused on the roster that we have,” said Vrabel. “I think we tried to be as close to the plan as we could, going through free agency and how we wanted to allocate it over the next two years, counting this year and next year when we look at the cap going out over two years.”
It’s as if Vrabel caught himself from going down a completely different path with that answer, quickly changing course towards a cliche “we like the guys we have” type of response.
“If something were to present itself that we would be able to do some things…” - you could see the wheels spinning in his head.
He knows they have a ton of cap space, and we know from his answers back in June that he’s thinking about these types of opportunities.
Public practice for the Patriots will resume on Monday, with gates opening to the public at 9:15 a.m. ET.
Stay locked in to WEEI and WEEI.com for all the latest from Patriots training camp.