Oct 29, 2023; Miami Gardens, Florida, USA; New England Patriots defensive end Keion White (99) reaches for the pass of Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa (1) during the first half at Hard Rock Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jasen Vinlove-USA TODAY Sports

In the course of roughly 90 minutes Tuesday evening, the New England Patriots traded away two players who started a combined 26 games the year before. Defenders Keion White and Kyle Dugger weren't dealt in blockbuster deals. They were shipped to the San Francisco 49ers and Pittsburgh Steelers, respectively, for swaps of late round draft picks next spring.

That's the work you'd expect from a two-win pile of nothing looking forward to the future. But that's not the Patriots. They're 6-2 and lead the AFC East, one win away from the NFL's best record.

That makes these deals, a week from the 2025 NFL trade deadline, a fascinating case study in pro football turnaround. Just two years ago White and Dugger looked like building blocks for a struggling franchise. White, a second-round pick in 2023, led the team with 51 quarterback pressures in 2024 -- 18 more than second-place Anfernee Jennings. Dugger, a second-round pick in 2020, played well enough as a thumping, downhill safety with coverage chops to earn a four-year, $58 million extension before the 2024 campaign.

White and Dugger looked like the future. But head coach Mike Vrabel's arrival painted them as relics of the past.

The most recent ex-Patriots were bright spots on bad teams. They starred in the dying days of Bill Belichick's crumbling empire and stood out along a sloppy backdrop of Jerod Mayo's failed debut. They were remnants of a past New England badly wanted behind it, firing Mayo after one four-win season to bring in Vrabel one year after the Tennessee Titans opted out of his competence and turned to Brian Callahan (who was fired after 23 games and four wins in Nashville).

Vrabel's arrival meant new systems. Past performance meant little. Dugger slid in and out of the starting lineup in favor of fourth-round rookie Craig Woodson and unheralded veteran Jaylinn Hawkins, who'd been reduced to mostly a special teams role with the Atlanta Falcons in 2023 before finding new life in Foxborough. The expensive veteran's snap share dropped from 98 percent of the team's defensive plays in Belichick's last season to just 44 percent before being shipped to Pittsburgh. Lapses in coverage and a missed tackle rate that spiked to a career-worst 15.6 in 2024 left him unable to impress Vrabel, who used him as a high profile example that skill, not contract value, determines who plays in his defense.

White was a significantly less expensive piece of the puzzle but lacked Dugger's resume. His 51 pressures ranked 26th in the NFL last season, but his five sacks didn't even crack the top 70. The Patriots came into the 2025 offseason with a boatload of salary cap space and a new-look defense that shifted from Mayo's defensive back-heavy schemes to something resembling a more traditional 3-4 setup. White had to compete for snaps in an edge rush rotation that included Jennings and two new additions in Vrabel's former Tennessee Pro Bowler Harold Landry as well as K'Lavon Chaisson, who'd developed into a solid platoon piece but largely failed to live up to his billing after being a 2020 first round pick.

That gave White the opportunity to shine against some high profile, but flawed, new arrivals. But Landry and Chaisson have been better than expected for the AFC East leaders. Landry is on pace for 11-plus sacks, which would be his most since 2021. Chaisson's 17 percent pressure rate ranks 11th in the league among linebackers with at least 50 pass rushing reps. He's one sack away from setting a career high. The signings that looked shaky back in April were the very ones that made 2024's most promising Patriot edge rusher expendable. White played 49 snaps per game in 2024; he played just 123 snaps in the Pats first eight games of 2025.

It's possible this comes back to haunt a team whose 6-2 record features a single victory over a team with a winning record (at the Buffalo Bills) and a Week 1 loss to a Las Vegas Raiders team that's looked inept in the Sundays since. Neither White nor Dugger were pending free agents, so they could have been traded in the offseason instead and kept as injury insurance this fall. White was set to cost only about $2.5 million against the 2026 salary cap and the team had to eat a reported $5-plus million to offload Dugger's salary. Any immediate savings here are minimal, though Dugger's move wipes away $9 million in 2026 dead cap commitments had he remained on the roster and been released in the offseason instead.

But Vrabel had a waning use for two once-promising players. Dugger missed more than half the defensive snaps on the field because his head coach didn't trust him. White was a healthy scratch last week when he should have been licking his chops at the opportunity to turn Dillon Gabriel into dust against a leaky Cleveland Browns offensive line. Thus, general manager Eliot Wolf did a very Belichick thing and moved on from them in favor of draft picks that will likely be packaged in some form to land a fifth rounder who probably won't amount to much but has more theoretical potential than New England judged White and Dugger did.

It's a rebuilding-type trade for the AFC East leaders. It's a move that shows past performance won't save you in New England and that the Patriots understand their place is tenuous even if Drake Maye is playing like an MVP. Vrabel isn't Belichick, but he's making it fully known he learned from the head coach under whom he'd played eight years and won three Super Bowls.

In his first season with the Patriots, Vrabel was an overlooked linebacker who'd been released by the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was asked to take over for former All-Pro Chris Slade, who Belichick released earlier that year when he was no longer a fit in his defense. Swapping out a big name to elevate a lesser-known player who was a better fit led to one of the biggest upsets in Super Bowl history months later.

Now, Vrabel hopes swapping out two players who once looked like New England's building blocks for the future has a similar effect.

This article originally appeared on For The Win: The Patriots trades show Bill Belichick's lessons haven't been lost

Reporting by Christian D'Andrea, For The Win / For The Win

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