FFS I didnt want to include the tweet. I saw a half dozen tweets that were all about the same thing so I asked if anyone had heard it from a reputable source and I was dinged for NOT posting the 100% admitted non verifiable ones so i posted a bunch of them. Which were absolutely rumblings. I never presented them as more than that. I'll take a self imposed break because this exchange was completely multi directional and made no sense and maybe its just that Ive had a long day.
If he’s right, he can spike the football. If not, ie, the Pats miss the playoffs again but BB survives, he can count on the masses forgetting he said it and/or point to some other intervening event/variable.
Curran has really shifted more towards being about takes than actual football, is a shame.
I'm assuming that means that Kraft trusted Bill to manage the Brady situation and wasn't entirely pleased that Tom went out and won a SB while the Pats threw Cam out there and had no real plan. I suspect last year was kind of a similar reaction with Josh leaving and the wheels coming off the offense, hence all the rumblings and grumblings.
"Need clicks now" is a rough way to go through life. I'd feel bad for all of the former, half-decent sportswriters in this town if they hadn't all turned into trolls.
I just don't know how you can even say that. They won 6 fucking rings for chrissakes. Even if you're on the "BUT BRADY" train, it was Bill who had to put those teams on the field and coach them up -- and with almost never any picks before, like, 28.
Take the best HC ever, give him the best QB ever for 20 solid years, and I think it's fair to say that you don't need more than a competent GM to have unprecedented success.
That's the point. Since it has no intrinsic meaning, it can mean whatever the reader wants it to mean, and the writer can never be wrong.
In another thread here, I did a bunch of stuff on BB's drafting. It has been superb. Absolutely superb. He makes lots of mistakes, of course, but so does every GM, especially if you do it for 23 years in a row. Consider all the decisions a GM has to make over that span of time. Drafting, trades, free agents, cap management, hiring coaches, etc. He's done an OUTSTANDING job as GM.
I think all one has to do is look at Manning's Colts or Rodgers's Packers (two HoF QBs) to see the difference their respective coaches/GMs made.
Great post. I just want to highlight the bolded because the universe in which Bill needed to operate was so different than those 9ers teams. Outside of a cap, Kraft might have told Bill to go nuts and the Patriots would need to build another tier onto Gilette in order to have room for all the banners.
Yep.
I mean, other teams had to cut good players too for salary cap reasons during the BB/TB era. But yeah if they could have just kept the band together....the sky was the limit for New England.
Everyone outside of New England gets him. And most people inside do. Cranky old pants talk radio listeners are a loud minority. And some folks who have amnesia about how bad it was around here between 1986 and 2001.
In like half those losses Manning had his worst passer rating of the season or something like that.
I know this forum is a bit generous with its BB love, but calling his drafting history "superb" just seems a bit over the top. I've never seen an analysis of the Pats' drafting as being anything better than league-average over the course of the BB era, so can you link me to this thread you're referring to? Everything you listed here is just a compendium of team accomplishments and the Brady/BB joint resume, it doesn't tell us anything about BB's ability to draft or acquire talent relative to the rest of the league.
Yeah it is. Really hard.
I disagree with this. I think Belichick has done an exceptional job managing within the cap constraints, identifying undervalued assets, picking which guys to re-sign and which ones to move on from, and getting value when moving on from those guys, etc. I don't think the salary cap leveled out Belichick's advantages; I think it heightened them.
It'll take me some time to go through all of what is clearly a ton of analytical effort, but this ends in 2013. Man, that's 10 years ago. I love to "celebrate what is/was" just as much as anyone else here, but where is this team right now? When is the last great draft? Where are the building blocks for continued success? This is the least talented team in the division and one of the bottom feeders of a stacked conference. Winning 7-8 games and congratulating BB for getting that out of a 3-4 win team is getting tiresome. If Mac doesn't make a jump under BOB this year, they are back to square one and I don't know what the plan is.
I explained why I had to end the study in 2013: "I am only looking at drafts from 2000-2013. This is because drafts after 2013 are much more impacted by the fact that I don't have the 2022 season data in it, which does change some things, but also by the fact that the longer the career, the better chance to hit the two benchmarks I'm about to look for."
He definitely had some down years drafting for sure. He's improved a lot in the last few though. On the WHOLE he's been really good at it though.
There was a series of bad drafts leading up to 2020 (mainly 2017-2019, and 2016 being impacted by injury). And 2020 had 3 third round picks disappoint, which hurts even as he hit some singles and doubles the rest of that draft. Player acquisition looks meh mainly because of Jonnu Smith signing, but literally every single NFL GM has their Jonnu Smith. Algholor was awful, but Henry and of course Judon were hits.
First, nobody knows how the 2023 draft will play out. Same can be said to a certain extent about 2022 draft as well.
It's about league average starter at the position, so I would say he is an asset. Their WR corps was weak last season, and so Henry doesn't exactly make up for that. Still may be a problem this season, but we shall see.
The reason I did all that analysis that hopefully you’ll read is to avoid conversations like this. Because you’re wrong if you think that getting a “small handful” of impact players in a few drafts is a bad outcome. The data is clear on this. I hope you read through it all.
I'm quite familiar with the trope that "the NFL draft is a crapshoot, it's REALLY hard to do well so stop criticizing BB on this." We always come back to this on this sub.
I mean it’s fine if you don’t want to read it. Totally your call and I take no offense at all.
