FOXBORO — Let’s leave the dead horses be.

The Patriots are a bad team playing out a lost season. So are a half-dozen other teams.

Bill Belichick’s future is uncertain. Whose isn’t?

But what of the past, and what could have been?

After last weekend’s loss, Belichick admitted losing three starters to injury factored into the offense’s decision to turtle in the final minutes against Kansas City.

“I would say we didn’t feel like we were able to do probably what we should have done in that situation,” he said.

So were it not for Hunter Henry, Cole Strange and Conor McDermott going down, how would the Pats have played? Stepping back, might that question apply to the entire season?

Belichick could – and maybe will in his end-of-year meeting with Robert Kraft – try to pin the Patriots’ season on poor injury luck. Their offense and defense have both been devastated by injury. It feels like a hard sell, but let’s play it out.

The Patriots’ only path to exceeding expectations this year – defined as winning nine-plus games, given their preseason over/under win total was 7.5 – started with good health. That’s the quiet, understand truth about completing in the NFL. The healthiest teams surprise, the good, healthy teams fight for a Super Bowl, and everyone else inevitably goes home.

But once the season kicked off, the injury bug kicked back. Belichick lost arguably his two best defenders in Week 4, with Matt Judon and Christian Gonzalez suffering season-ending injuries at Dallas. Later, the Pats lost their leading receiver, Kendrick Bourne, for the year, and his successor, Demario Douglas absorbed a second concussion weeks later.

Amid all that, the top offensive tackles Belichick signed in free agency combined to play just six games. Both are now gathering dust on injured reserve. Even when one of them, Calvin Anderson, started Weeks 1 and 2, the Pats couldn’t field a completely healthy line and lost.

Left tackle Trent Brown missed the second game, while left guard Cole Strange and right guard/tackle Mike Onwenu sat out the opener. All three have since been absent for more games. Star running back Rhamondre Stevenson missed multiple kickoffs, as have veterans Jonathan Jones, J.C. Jackson, DeVante Parker, JuJu Smith-Schuster, Marcus Jones and Josh Uche.

So, yes, the Patriots have gone from the walking wounded to the Walking Dead partly because of bad injury luck. But if the Patriots needed good fortune to prove themselves a good team, how good were they to begin with?

Because no reasonable person watching this team could believe less time in the trainer’s room would have guaranteed enough wins to ensure a playoff push. The chief reason for that is the one position that remained and simultaneously nuked the Patriots’ chances in several games: quarterback.

Bailey Zappe’s personal goal to finish Patriots season is an obvious one

Mac Jones broke on Belichick's watch. Belichick failed to insulate Jones - a pocket-pound passer highly dependent on his surrounding talent - well enough as a GM, and offensive coordinator Bill O'Brien couldn't prevent him from reverting to his worst habits under pressure. That led to four benchings for Jones, who isn't injured like half the starting quarterbacks in the league, but might as well be.

It's also fair to wonder how much responsibility, if any, Belichick bears for the health of his team. Again, bad luck factors heavily with injuries. That cannot be dismissed.

However, several NFL teams, including perennial contenders like the Bills, Bengals, Cowboys and Eagles, regularly grant veteran starters rest days during the week to expedite their recovery. The Patriots never do, save for maybe one per season for Matthew Slater or the now retired Devin McCourty. Those same load-management clubs, like Philadelphia, conduct light training camps in the name of injury prevention, whereas the Patriots hit hard and often in the summer.

On Wednesday, Belichick seemed to ascribe the Pats' injuries to bad lucky by noting they've mostly been caused by on-field contact; something unavoidable in a game of orchestrated violence.

"It’s almost all contact injuries. Those are hard to account for – concussions, knees, ankles, shoulders. It’s been contact injuries," he said. "You've got a couple of sicknesses, flus here and there. Control what you can control."

Rhamondre Stevenson among 3 Patriots starters missing at practice Wednesday

Belichick is right to separate those injuries from soft-issue injuries, like a hamstring pull, that the team believes it can prevent with better hydration and more running. The Patriots have also helped injury-prone players like Parker and tight end Hunter Henry play more in New England than they did for prior teams. But missed games are missed games.

According to ManGamesLost.com, an analytics company that claims to provide injury data for 21 NFL teams, the Patriots' injured players missed more games from 2009-22 than those on every other team in the league except four. In 2015, the Patriots were, in fact, the NFL's most injured team.

Is that all randomness? Bad luck?

Months after the 2015 season, Belichick seemingly tried to address that problem when he hired director of performance and rehabilitation Johann Bilsborough. At the time, Bilsborough worked solely for the Celtics, quantifying players’ sleep, recovery and energy expended on the court and in the weight room; all in the name of maximizing performance and minimizing injury risk.

Today, Bilsborough's data helps inform decisions made by the Patriots' coaches and strength and conditioning staff. But according to one source who spoke to the Herald for a story in August, the structure and intensity of practices largely went unchanged from the time Bilsborough arrived to as recently as the last few seasons. Belichick doesn't seem to apply his teachings like other teams who employ sports scientists.

“I don’t think they used (the data) that much, to be quite honest,” a source said. “Guys would run a lot of yards, and it would show maybe they should slow down. And then they’d have to do the same thing the next day.”

If that's held true this season, the Patriots likely incurred additional risk by stubbornly abiding by an old-school approach. That's a problem. Not to mention, it leads to another dead horse of this Patriots season: what if?

What if the Patriots had won one of their first two games?

What if Jones hadn't broken?

What if Belichick had seriously altered his approach to injury management during a make-or-break year?

What if, what if, what if ...