Dave Caban shares his baseline 2024 projection for the New England Patriots while also considering the impacts of increases/decreases to market shares and team play volume.

Every offseason, I undertake the process of creating projections for every team. In previous years, this involved developing a projection that I believed would represent the average performance of all relevant players if a given season were played out thousands of times. This year, I have added steps to better understand how a player’s fantasy scoring could increase or decrease if changes in his market shares or his team’s play volumes were considered. Although my projections will inevitably have some large variances from actuals, this process will allow us to better understand a player’s potential upside and downside. (Quarterbacks were not included in this process as more nuance would be required and this exercise felt like one more suitable for the other positions. If time allows, I will home in on something similar for passers.)

Quick Programming Note: Moving forward in this series, I’ll be streamlining my analysis by condensing comments on baseline predictions, market share changes, and team play volume changes into a single notes section. I’ll focus on highlighting only the most critical insights. This approach will help me cover more teams, hopefully all, before some of your drafts at the end of August.

Team Level Considerations

My baseline projection positions the Patriots near the bottom of the league in overall play volume. Specifically, it places the team in the 38th percentile of passing and 19th percentile of rushing based on my 2024 projections set when this article was published. It will be the team’s first season without Bill Belichick in 23 years, but there’s little reason to expect enough offensive improvement for the team to get back to offensive volume averages.

Baseline Projections Player-Level Summary