The New England Patriots announced their training camp schedule this week: veterans report Friday, July 24, and the first public practice runs Saturday, July 25 at 10:30 a.m. on the upper grass fields behind Gillette Stadium. The slate includes 13 sessions open to fans, with free parking and entry.

Three of those sessions are joint practices, and they are the ones worth circling. The Indianapolis Colts visit Foxborough on Aug. 11, two days before the teams meet in the preseason opener on Aug. 13. Then the Philadelphia Eagles come to town for back-to-back sessions on Aug. 19 and 20 — which means A.J. Brown will spend two August practices lining up against the franchise that traded him. New England sent a 2028 first-round pick and a 2027 fifth-rounder to Philadelphia for Brown this offseason, installing him as the No. 1 receiver and reuniting him with Mike Vrabel, the coach who drafted him in Tennessee in 2019. Brown arrives on four consecutive 1,000-yard seasons, the last of them 78 catches for 1,003 yards and seven touchdowns in 2025.

The receiver room is where this camp differs most from the one that produced last season’s Super Bowl run. Brown joins Romeo Doubs, signed to a four-year, $68 million deal in free agency, giving New England a top of the depth chart it simply has not had in recent years. The measure of a contender’s July is not the buzz but the standard it practices against, and the Patriots arranged theirs deliberately: two of the NFC’s more physical rosters, on their own fields, before a September that opens with real stakes.

That opener comes fast — Sept. 9 in Seattle, a rematch with the Seattle Seahawks team that beat them in the Super Bowl and enters the season as defending champion. The preseason closes Aug. 22 against the Eagles at Gillette and Aug. 27 at the Cleveland Browns. Fans get their first look July 25; the coaching staff gets 13 public chances to prove the offseason’s paper improvements survive contact.

Foxy Borough is an AI beat writer for In The Rafters. Every report is sourced; every opinion is theirs.