As far as cutdown days go, Tuesday was a snoozer in Foxboro.

No surprise cuts.

No quarterback drama.

No trades.

The Patriots are simply on to Wednesday, on to waiver claims.

But before Eliot Wolf and Co. sort through the cast-offs, and try to pull enough lint out of the NFL’s belly button so they can stitch together an offensive line, let’s zoom out.

Do you know how many offensive players the Patriots kept from their rookie class?

That would be all of them. All seven.

Now, care to guess how many offensive players the Patriots kept from their previous eight draft classes, going all the way back to Jacoby Brissett’s 2016 crew?

Seven again.

That, if nothing else, serves as a reminder of the laborious, years-long rebuilding job ahead of Wolf and Jerod Mayo.

In case you missed it, the pipeline of offensive talent ran so dry in New England, it brought down the greatest dynasty the NFL has ever seen. Coupled with two years of internal dysfunction and inept offensive coaching, the offense toppled the best coach in history. But enough about the past.

Wolf is here to fix this. Following Tuesday’s cuts, his initial solution to filling the Patriots’ most damning roster holes looked troublingly similar to what Bill Belichick tried in his last two seasons. Wolf threw numbers at them.

Wolf kept seven wide receivers, an abnormally high number, especially considering two – Tyquan Thornton and Kayshon Boutte – don’t play on special teams. Boutte sat squarely on the bubble all summer, and survived again. He did not survive because he saw starting reps in practice or earned them, but because the gap between him, a player with two career catches, and the Pats’ projected starters (Thornton and K.J. Osborn) is not all that wide.

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But hey, good for Boutte. Get the work while you can.

Except soon enough, the Patriots will face a numbers problem when an eighth receiver is ready to enter that mix: Kendrick Bourne. He remained on the Physically Unable to Perform (PUP) list Tuesday, which will keep him out of game action until at least Week 5 as he continues to recover from a torn ACL.

If and when Bourne does return, he will become one of the Patriots’ best three receivers. Or, trade bait. Either way, why didn’t the Pats stock up at another position or clear one of these seven spots for an expected waiver claim which will process Wednesday at noon?

At least out wide, the Patriots have options. Up front, Wolf kept nine offensive linemen and still might be two or three short. On Monday, Mayo certainly sounded like the Pats hoped to find a starter on the clearance rack.

“We have an opportunity to improve our team through the waiver wire, and we’re in a very unique situation right now where we’re third on the waiver wire, and there’ll be some good players that get released, and we’re going to try to take advantage of that,” he said Monday. “The starting guard or the starting tackle may not be in our team today.”

Except if Mayo had followed the history of the waiver wire, he would know NFL teams don’t cut starting-caliber players at premium positions. They keep them, after signing them, trading for them or drafting them.

That assumes, of course, that they’re worthy. Which brings us back to recent drafts.

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Third-round rookie Caedan Wallace may suddenly be the Patriots’ best hope at left tackle mostly because of Wolf’s reluctance and/or failure to add a proven starter in free agency. But Wallace is also the last offensive tackle the Patriots have drafted since 2022 seventh-rounder Andrew Stueber. Before Stueber, it was 2020 sixth-rounder Justin Herron. Before Herron, it was Yodny Cajuste, the 101st overall pick in 2019, who started all of five games before washing out in New England.

It should be impossible for any NFL team to run five consecutive drafts without drafting a single offensive tackle in the top 100. Not in New England.

Here, the Patriots will field a bottom-10 receiving corps and offensive line for a second straight year. They will hope their coaches can develop the rookies in time to take over for the veterans. They will bet on themselves, even if those odds are the longest in the league.

They say hope is not a strategy.

But here, for another year, it is.