Assuming it’s true, the overruling his scouts on Deebo Samuel and AJ Brown thing because the ASU coach recommended Harry personally to Bill, is really interesting. We can all get angry and upset about it – the arrogance!
But really, it’s a very human thing as you get older to lose people around you that you trust. Ernie Adams and Bill went to high school together fer chrissakes. They could probably finish each other’s sentences by the “Malcolm, go!”/Pink Stripes era. He’d worked with Scar for 20+ years as well as the year back in 1996. Ivan Fears. Josh, who had worked with him since 2001. That kind of stuff is not just “hard to replace” – it’s literally impossible to replace.
So human nature says you start doing stuff to compensate. Leaning on guys you have known a long time (ASU coach) but who don’t work in your organization. Or weird things like hiring guys you know super well for jobs they aren’t trained for (Patricia).
In addition to it being for the GOAT, the human element of this is partly why I think Kraft went out of his way in that joint appearance and the followup presser to be generous towards Bill. Because, putting aside the quibbles we’ve read about in the postmortems, the mistakes he made the last few years were not made out of malice or anger, but rather because he had lost the support system he had nurtured and built over more than thirty years. His work ethic and commitment to winning, as have been described numerous times, never wavered.
That’s partly why I’m not entirely surprised the Patriots are reportedly considering keeping the personnel structure in place. By the end, it seems like the bottleneck was, for the most part, Bill. And as with the Mayo hire, they seem to feel like while some of the decision making may need a reset on the personnel side, the culture and organization they’ve built are worth preserving.
