Milton Williams earned the largest contract of the 2025 offseason, with his $104MM in total value and $63MM in guaranteed money pacing the class. The financials obviously played a big role in the defensive lineman ultimately joining the Patriots, although Williams recently admitted that the presence of newly hired head coach Mike Vrabel was the true deciding factor.
“I wanted to be under Vrabel,” Williams said (via ESPN’s Mike Reiss). “He played in this league. He knows what D-line looks like. I could pick his brain for anything I could add to my game to make me a better player. This scheme fits exactly my play style, being aggressive up front.”
There were rumblings that Williams was destined for the Panthers before the Patriots swooped in at the eleventh hour. After handing the veteran the most lucrative contract in franchise history (in terms of AAV), New England was clearly hoping their acquisition could anchor their defense. So far, Williams has lived up to the bargain, as he’s totaled a pair of sacks and five tackles for loss in his first four games with the organization.
Williams garnered his contract following a successful run with the Eagles. The defensive tackle was often deployed as a rotational option, with the former third-round pick topping out at 501 defensive snaps played in 2024 (which represented less than half of his team’s total defensive snaps). There were some questions if Williams would be capable of transitioning into a near-full-time role with the Patriots, and he hasn’t had an issue staying on the field for his new club. Through four games, Williams has appeared in a career-high 68 percent of his team’s defensive snaps.
As the organization looks to continue building off a 2-2 start, they’ll be getting some defensive reinforcement. After cornerback Christian Gonzalez made his season debut this past weekend, the team will soon welcome back linebacker Jahlani Tavai. The veteran landed on IR with a calf injury to begin the season and is now eligible to be activated. According to Reiss, a Week 5 return has been the player’s target throughout his rehab.
Tavai provided a bit of stability for the Patriots over the past few years. He averaged 112 tackles per season between 2023 and 2024, although he may be hard pressed to reach those levels in 2025. He’ll be joining a deeper inside linebackers corps that’s currently led by Robert Spillane and Christian Elliss.
The organization is also staying busy off the field. Kurt Badenhausen, Eben Novy-Williams, and Scott Soshnick of Sportico recently reported that Robert Kraft agreed to sell a minority stake in his franchise. The buyers are Sixth Street (3 percent) and Dean Metropoulos (5 percent), and the Kraft family will continue to own about 90 percent of the team. The funds are intended to be reinvested into the team and won’t be used to finance the New England Revolution, the Kraft family’s MLS club.
Notably, this stake in the franchise represents a valuation of $9 billion. Per Sportico, that would be the second-richest valuation for a franchise in NFL history, with a recent Giants stake equaling a $10 billion valuation. The league recently allowed a select list of private equity firms to purchase small chunks of NFL teams.