What's your theory for this? The Pats have 20 years of excellence and 4 years of mediocrity under BB. How do you come to the conclusion that the 4 years tell us more going forward than the 20?
This is now: BB and the direction of the Patriots
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For the same reason I don't rent a VHS from Blockbuster after shopping at Caldor. Things change.
So your theory is that BB isn't current with today's football technology. I look at what the defense is up to and have a hard time believing that.
On defense he seems to have kept up with the league and continues to roll out impressive sides.
Offensively I get the sense he's become extremely conservative. It could be the passage of time, or lack of confidence in their ability to come back, or a number of different things.
I would add that offensively it's becoming a bit clearer that Brady really was the engine that made the offense go. I would also add that the passive approach to building the O line and WR position in particular (and to a lesser extent, TE) is sort of counter to what successful teams are doing and it shows.
I think on offense his goal was to zig when other teams zagged. He's been trying to build a bruising offense for the last few years and it just hasn't worked. Sometimes you gotta zag too.
I still maintain that we look at Bill's acumen on offense quite differently if he didn't blow the Harry pick (and, to a lesser extent, the Thornton pick) so badly.
And Sony. And Wynn. And then you start to think... he hasn't been very good at drafting offensive players at all. Strange is still a huge question mark. Etc.
I will maintain for the rest of my days that Sony was a good pick because he contributed IMMEDIATELY and in a huge way to a Super Bowl win.
I can understand why Wynn was drafted where he was, and he probably represents the median outcome for the 23rd overall pick. And, who knows, he may have been better had he not missed so much time his first 3 seasons with injuries, which were not predictable (nobody can predict a popped Achilles or a broken toe or an in-game knee injury).
Michel was drafted at the ass end of the 1st round, and had a decent rookie season and an outstanding playoff run that ended in a Lombardi. Biggest question is whether they should have taken an RB with a history of knee issues, but for that team at the time it was probably fine.
Harry was a much worse pick all around. There has to be a story there, because there's a lot of smoke out there that he looked awful from Day 1.
Right, can't take that away. But I think it's also irrefutable that Chubb >>> Sony and that seemed obvious to a lot of people before the draft.
Re: the bolded part, IIRC the story is that in 2019 that Pats scouts preferred Samuel and Brown, but BB ultimately overruled them because he knew Harry's college coach and trusted his assessment of Harry over the scouting department. He zagged when everyone,including his own team, wanted him to zig and it backfired. Furthermore, it led a number of scouts to basically question what they were even doing if they would spend their days scouting talent only for the guy in charge to ignore it and go with his buddy's word.
Need some sort of report of confirmation of this. First time I've heard this angle.
https://www.si.com/nfl/2021/04/05/mmqb-sean-payton-drew-brees-taysom-hill-jameis-winston-competition
A bunch of other sites (NESN, CBS, NBCSports) cited it at the time, but the above was the original place it appeared.
Which makes this hurt even more (I posted this in the 2024 draft pick thread the other day, couldn't figure out where to put it):
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkmKcahjJfE
That article also suggests that BB learned from his mistake and embraced a more collaborative process moving forward. Whether that is true I don’t know…not sure if one can tell from the results: scouts miss too.
I do find it hard to believe that BB ignores all his scouts and merely goes by “gut feeling” and old friendships on every pick. Seems like giving him too much (and too little) credit.
Yep…it’s a painful crappy memory. What could have been.
But this is endemic to drafting, no? Every team has these sad what if stories. We have just had a few more than are healthy lately…
Does BB ignore every pick the scouts like and go with his gut or his friends? I doubt it. I doubt he knew Dugger's college coach, for example. But I think it does (and did) happen. 2020 seemed to be more "chalk", going for Mac Jones (a position of need in what was then considered a fairly loaded QB draft class) and Barmore, a talented D guy who had questions about attitude and slipped to the second round. But then the year after that he drafted Strange (still indefensible in my mind as a massive reach) and Thornton (a whiff so far, and the thought process was he would not be available the next time the Pats went to draft). So who knows. Somebody has been missing on the Pats drafts and BB is the guy in charge, so he gets the blame when it goes bad.
That story is a little different than what you portrayed. Patriots placed more emphasis on Harry's visit and didn't have the staff in the war room to push back. That was also several front offices ago. As mentioned in the article, they made some changes a few years ago and when Groh took over this year he made more changes to the process. How the Pats approached one pick 5 years ago doesn't seem to have much relation on what they might do going forward.
Sony was a major contributor to a Lombardi. He wasn't a great RB and didn't have a great career, but if every first round pick the Pats made turned out to be key contributors to Super Bowl championships, I think we'd all be quite happy with them.
I think BB's better draftees on offense have tended to come in the later rounds. Let's start with 2016, just to pick a random year.
2016: Mitchell (4th), Karras (6th)
2017: McDermott (6th) - surprisingly has been ok with the Pats after being let go and then picked up again
2018: Berrios (6th) - I know he didn't play for NE but he's had a solid NFL career
2019: Stidham (4th) - still in the NFL as a backup
2020: Onwenu (6th), Herron (6th)
2021: Stevenson (4th)
2022: Strong (4th), Zappe (4th) - Strong plays for Cle, Zappe still in the NFL as a backup
2023: Sow (4th), Mafi (5th), Douglas (6th), Boutte (6th)
That's pretty nice work in recent years drafting offensive players late in the draft. Where he's tended to miss is drafting them EARLY. Which is a problem because this next draft, he absolutely needs to nail some high draft picks on OFFENSE.
Yeah this is pretty common knowledge. The scouts loved Deebo and AJ Brown, but BB went with Harry because of an endorsement by Todd Graham and because Harry knocked his top 30 visit out of the park.
The pick of Tyquan Thortnon isn't exactly a glowing endorsement of the current structure in place either.
But likely more than balanced out by the selection of Douglas in the 6th. And I'd still like to see Boutte get playing time; that is a potential coaching miss if he doesn't get any more time this season.
If he legit needs more coaching, I'm not sure if it's the worst thing in the world for him to get some skills development time. I have no idea, and it's hard to judge someone by one game, but maybe with the speed of the pro game, some more time on the juggs gun, sideline drills, ball security drills, etc. wouldn't be the worst thing to build his confidence before sending him back out for big snaps. Not sure that's the case, but it could be.
Not sure Pop balances out a 2nd round miss. Could be sitting here with George Pickens and Pop.....
This is precisely what he's been trying to do since late 2018. The execution of it has been awful.
Maybe but he's been back like two weeks and has started seeing more snaps and made a couple of decent catches. If he's healthy and doesn't see the field or do much when he's on there, then yes. But given that it seemed to take these guys a few weeks to get on the same page with BOB's system, I wouldn't 100% write him off just yet.
That the Patriots could have had (yes, we can do "could have had" all day, every team could) Devin Lloyd and George Pickens instead of Strange and Thornton...is just extremely hard to swallow. Especially after so massively blowing the Harry pick.
The scouts had red flags on Harry and preferred two other players. You're letting the phrase "without more input from scouts" do a lot of heavy lifting. For all I know, BB went back to those scouts and asked them to make their case and they couldn't do it any better than they did. I don't know and I highly doubt you do either. What I do know is that BB is the guy in charge, whether he ignores his scouts or listens to them, the decision is ultimately his.
Several front offices ago? This was 5 years ago, the front office has not turned over "several times" in that span. And BB is the guy in charge anyway, so it is still his front office regardless of who he hires as people to help him out.
It is indicative of a larger problem and one that arguably has not been fixed given that the FO (once again - this is BB) went out and made such dynamite selections as Cole Strange in the first round and Tyquan Thornton.
Also, not that it matters to you, but I find it amusing that this whole portion of the thread was me addressing someone who said "why should the last 4 years matter, look at the last 20!!!" and here I am being confronted with "who cares about what happened 5 years ago? Look at the last four!"
I mean, insomuch as having a top 1-3 QB is better than having a top 15-25 QB, yes. That makes any offense go or not go.
However, I think it's worth pointing out that Brady did benefit from having two fantastic OCs, as well as having the greatest OL coach in history combined with generally excellent OL talent keep him protected. Honestly, I think it's a weird thing to see people say we now have proof BB was the cog that drove the offense. I'm not sure I ever believed that at any point in my life, other than he had chosen some great coaches along the way. He also drafted some big players, though outside WR he could never seem to nail after Branch.
Wynn looked pretty good until all the injuries to be fair. I don't think he ever recovered, that's the fear when a gigantic mass of human who's responsible for pushing around other gigantic masses of humans tears an achilles.
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Fair. I guess the point I was trying to make was that having Brady (and his OCs and OL coach) really freed up BB to focus on other areas since he did not have to constantly worry about his offense. Now that Brady is gone and BB is struggling to get even a fraction of Brady's production out of Cam Newton (washed at that point, plus COVID) and Mac Jones (I will generously say mixed opinions, though largely veering toward the negative) really goes to show how important Brady was.
No doubt. Brady is the greatest player in NFL history and he made BB's job a hell of a lot easier, especially as GM. However, I think Brady also benefitted tremendously from BB, both as coach and GM, throughout his 20 years. It was a once-in-a-generation symbiotic relationship between player and coach/GM.
All this people going back and saying "Oh it was all Brady, BB is a bum without Brady" stuff is really over the top, though. Not saying you said that, you didn't, but it's out there atm. All from the same people who 5 years ago said Manning/Rodgers would have won 8 SB with BB and his defenses/system. People probably won't recognize both in proper form until BB retires.
100% agree. BB and Brady both benefitted tremendously from each other; it's not like Brady was out there playing defense. I am sure that in some alternate universe Brady gets drafted by the Browns instead of Wynn and goes on to have an okay career for a few years as a backup QB, while BB is forced to play Michael Bishop when Bledsoe goes down and ends up having a career trajectory closer to John Fox than Don Shula.
ETA: (kidding obviously about the alternate universe)
Agree. His tenure went exactly the way you would expect/hope for a RB in this era. Contribute immediately while cost controlled, then move on from him before the second contract. I don't in any way think as a bust.
I remember at the time a lot of people projected Sony as more of a complete back who could produce in the passing game. And then he got to New England and was basically strictly a downhill runner.
Believe me, I’m hoping he’s not. I just haven’t read or seen anything to think he’s going to be a meaningful contributor anytime soon. Fingers crossed.
It could be that he needs time. But he was on the field for only 3 snaps on Sunday. Granted, some of that is that they played a lot of 2 TE sets, rotating among the 3 tight ends. But Thornton is still behind Bourne, Parker, Douglas, and now Reagor on the WR depth chart.
Well, he hasn't started seeing more snaps. He played 25 snaps his first game back and just 3 on Sunday. I wouldn't 100% write him off, but we can probably 85-90% write him off?
They moved on before the second contract; they moved on with still a year to go on the first contract. They really got one year out of Sony; he was pretty bad year two and then lost his job and got hurt in year three. That's not great return. It's awesome that the one good year coincided with a Super Bowl run, but there are certainly players they could have taken that would still be helping now.
Sony actually fumbled a lot in college but they fixed him in the pros.
Yup. I remember Sony catching the ball at UGA and he was supposed to be very good in pass protection.
When he got to New England it looked like he never caught a pass in his life for some reason
The WR and OL problems that are self-inflicted are the main reason I would like to see them move away from BB. How could you watch Parker and think I need to sign that guy for another year? I remember once when someone asked BB about getting the ball to a new receiver in the offense and his response was 'We throw to the open guy'. Parker is never open and Mac has thrown some awful interceptions when targeting him.
When Parker is targeted, he usually makes his quarterback look bad, and this goes back to Miami.
Here are his QB rating numbers when they pass to him, by season: 703, 98.5, 90.0, 86.3, 90.6, 60.8. (over the last 5+ years, because I cant' find stats from before that, but this includes his "good" years in Miami)
For his career, he has a success rate of 50.5%, a catch % of 58.6%. QB's have thrown 12 interceptions in the last 5+ years when targeting him (5 by Mac and 7 in Miami). This is over the course of 421 targets.
To put this in perspective.
Jakobi Meyers QB ratings by season: 91.4, 90.0, 81.0, 116.0 and 85.8.
He has a career success rate of 55.0%, a catch rate of 68.0%, his QB's have thrown 9 ints (2 by Cam, 3 by Mac over 2 years, and 4 this year in Vegas). This is over the course of 400 targets.
Awful.
It’s so painful to consider this team locked up both Parker and Smith Schuster to relatively big multi-year deals.
Do they cut both and eat the dead money remaining on their deals? Neither seem like a candidate for a bounce-back year or breakout 2024. For the production, you’re better off drafting a couple more prospects in the middle rounds and rolling them out with Pop and Boutte (I don’t see how Thornton makes this team next year).
It's probably cap-prohibitive, but if the Patriots can find a way to Jonnu Smith EITHER of those guys out of town - eat tons of $$$, just get a 6th or 7th - I hope they do it. Let's see what Boutte and Raegor have. Pop is already better than all of them.
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