Patriots special teams ace Matthew Slater will be back for another season with the team, but safety Devin McCourty has not made any decision about his future at this point.

McCourty joined Slater in saying they’d take some time before making a call about 2023 and McCourty said on The Patriots Report podcast that he’s still working though things. He said he will be taking a vacation with his family and spending time with his brother Jason because time away from football “helps you put things in perspective” about what you want from the future.

“Then it’ll be early March, second week in March, and we’ll start to, I think for me and my wife, decide and plan what the next year looks like,” McCourty said. “I think that’s around the time where free agency will be coming up, so it’ll be the right time to really start digging in and make a decision.”

Retirement talk has come up for McCourty the last couple of years, but he said “this is probably the first year that I’ve actually thought about it” and added that he can see himself doing other things as well as playing football in 2023. It sounds like the next couple of weeks will be spent figuring out which side of that fence makes the most sense to him.