In response to prolate0spheroid's comment:

True and here's the thing, I don't think anyone is asking this team to go all in every year, but I do think they should of went a little bit more aggressive last year or the year before. We have a very small window left to win another championship, we always seemed to be preparing for tomorrow, rather than right now (in both terms of drafts and free agent signings), why? I would of cared less if we were sitting here during this free agent period having to cut old and washed up talent like these teams in "salary cap hell" if we had won another Championship because we decided to go and sign a big name defender. I could of lived with that - what I'm having a hard time with is knowing that we shopped at Walmart - when the teams that won the recent Super Bowls didn't.

I don't think you can look at what's happened with the secondary over the past five or six years and say the Pats have been particularly successful at maintaining even adequate quality there.  McCourty is the only guy who seems to have proven he's a keeper--and even he's a keeper only because he can play a position different from the one he was drafted to play! 

 

Also, there's a direct connection between the inability to build a talented secondary, the Pats poor pass defense, and the inability to prevent big scoring plays in recent playoff games.

 

Since the axis of evil is addressing me all at once I'll answer is kind...

Show me the team in the NFL that CAN recover from injury and still win a Super Bowl, the short answer is that there isn't one, the Ravens got healthy and went streaking at just the right time.  

No team has All Pro caliber players sitting in waiting for the vets in front of them to go down, if they were that good they would already be playing, there are 32 teams in a "win now" league (as you guys are most assuredly proving with this thread), there's not a lot of room or time to develop or mold players on a bench, teams take players who can help them now.  No team can recover from numerous injuries and win.  We were one Rodney Harrison broken forearm away from going to another Super Bowl in 2006, injuries happen, this is football.  

We've still been in 5 Super Bowls since 2001 and won 3.  You can't expect us to sneak up on teams like those early 2000 teams, moreover we've been picking from the bottom of the draft since that time.  Yet there are 31 other teams that would leap at the chance to acquire Gronk (taken instead of Matthews) Hernandez, Wilfork, Mankins, Mayo, all of our runningbacks and even Jones and Hightower who will end up being solid players.  We've always had role players; Patrick Pass, the Aikens, Antwan Harris, JR Redmond, Jermaine Wiggens, they may not have been Pro Bowl players but they've helped us win, we may not have won without their contributions.

Teams devoid of talent don't win, that's why when BB arrived they went 5-11, all the coaching in the world wouldn't have helped them, they needed those draft classes in 2000 and 2001 (Brady, Seymour, Light) and beyond to put them over the top.  

This goes back to the draft "experts" on this forum, hindsight is your best friend.  I'd suggest you take Babe and myself up on our offer to create a draft day thread and submit your picks in real time to see, when you're on the clock, actually picking from a round and pool of available players, that you are still the expert that you think you are?  

What you'll find is that the draft is an inexact science and when you're relying on people its even more tenuous.

 

In response to prolate0spheroid's comment:

Exactly!

The improvement in adding a legit starter (talib) was obvious in the second half of last year.

Why not do this with 2-3 guys instead of 20-30 scrubs that resulted in a whole lot of dead money and lost championships?

Why not do it 5 years ago?

Maybe you should let Mallett run the offense. w/o TB, BB and NE are done. I am as sure as that knowing the sun comes up in the east. the onus can never be put on one guy, especially a HOF. when TB retires, so does BB and we all know why.

I really hope that when the Pat's go on another Super Bowl run over these next three years, and they will, that you guys do some groveling because it will be well deserved.  

One more defensive minded off season here and we're set up for a run, and you guys will have been complaining about a "rebuilding" team getting to two Super Bowls and winning their division every year along the way.  

It will sound entitled in hindsight, where you guys seemingly make your living...

In response to wozzy's comment:

When and if that time comes, we will be very happy as that is what we have been waiting for, for years.  One more defensive off-season has become another and another and another...... and still they need to replace DB's Chung?  Arrington?  Talib??  STARTERS!

You don't get it.

Stop the revolving doors, ....spend a little for talent...WIN Championships!

The End!

In response to wozzy's comment:

I love this "rebuilding" stuff...love it. There are probably two people in the entire country that call a team with a HOF QB in his prime, rebuilding. This is the NFL, teams with HOF qb's don't/aren't rebuilding they are reloading during the draft and free agency - just like everyone else. The only teams the are rebuilding are the 4 and 12 teams with their rookie first round draft pick quarterback And new head coach. You don't rebuild with a HOF coach and QB in their 10th years on a team...with the best slot receiver and best nose tackle in football. You are adding to it....and hopefully adding well, or you won't be winning anything.

call me after Brady retires...that's when we will be "rebuilding". Lol! This place will be a ghost town when it happens.

Oh stop it. I'm hardly an "entitled" fan.  I totally appreciate what the Pats do and have done.  That's why I continue to spend $4,000 a year on season tickets even though I live in freakin' Canada and have to shell out another few thousand bucks every year to get to the games.   

What we're debating on this thread is whether the Pats approach to talent acquisition is absolutely perfect and brilliant and beyond anything ever conceived by any other team in history (Rusty's point of view) or whether it's an approach that has pros and cons.  I definitely hold the latter point of view.  I think there are many pros to the Pats approach as evidenced by the team's extraordinary level of competitiveness year after year.  I do think, however, that there are some cons.  The downside of the Pats' strategy is that the team has, at times, been short on talent in key positions.  The secondary is the most glaring and consistent area of weakness, but other areas (OLB, DL, WR, RB) have been exceedingly short on talent in particular years too.  Because of great coaching, the Pats have been able to work around their talent weaknesses better than just about any other team could do, but there are times when the lack of talent comes back to bite them, especially if the problem is exacerbated by an injury to one of the better players (Gronk, Talib, Welker, Mankins).  The way the team is structured now, the offense has to be great, because the defense is unreliable.  But the offense is dependent on far too few weapons.  Take out a Gronk or a Welker and the offense goes from potent to anemic in a heartbeat.  And when the offense starts to sputter, the defense isn't talented enough to hold a thin lead because that secondary (and LBs) can't cover well and the front seven can't get any kind of pass rush.  Yeah, when everything is clicking along with no injuries, the team is great.  But when your talent level is thin, you're skating on thin ice.  Take out one of those talented players because of an injury (or a good defensive game plan), and everything melts down.  We've seen that in the playoffs for the past few years.  The problem hasn't been game planning or play calling as some try to maintain.  Belichick is the absolute best coach in the league, unequivocably.  The problem, pure and simple, has been a lack of talent, exacerbated by injuries. The way around that is to improve the talent.  And the way to do that may indeed be to worry a little less about "value" and cap discipline and instead focus on getting one or two more impact players at key positions--DL, CB, WR, etc. There's no lack of appreciation for what the Pats have done in recent years.  Believe me, I lived through the 1970s and 1980s and watched pathetic performance after pathetic performance.  But it doesn't mean there aren't things the Pats could do better.  And the one thing I think they really need to do to get back to champioinship level is invest in one or two more impact players.  They don't need to blow the bank and turn into the Jets, but they need a decent downfield receiver, a decent corner, a decent defensive tackle beside Wilfork, and one or two other impact players at a few key positions.  If they have to spend a bit to get that talent and risk a cap issue down the road, do it!  If we end up with JAGs at WR, RT, CB, and DT I'm afraid we'll have another year where Belichick coaches the team to contention, but then peters out in the postseason when those cracks in the talent level start to show and ultimately bring the whole ediface crashing down. 

 

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In response to RidingWithTheKing's comment:

Dennard looks good . . . if he isn't playing from jail . . .

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In response to RidingWithTheKing's comment:

Bottom line: All these "screwed" teams have won championships while the Pats keep rebuilding that great young defense with Merriweathers and Chungs and Butlers and Wheatleys and Wilhites and Crables and Cunninghams and Braces . . . 

 

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It's been pretty obvious what BB has been doing for years.  You're no genius for seeing that.  Everyone sees that. The question isn't what he's doing, it's whether what he's doing really works if the goal is to win championships.  

The bottom line is that it hasn't won championships. Yes, it's gotten us very close.  Yes, we've been consistently good.  Yes, being good year after year increases the odds of winning a championship.  But still, when we've had the chance, the team has had flaws that have prevented it from winning. In 2009 and 2010 we got absolutely nowhere in the playoffs.  In 2011 we went far, but we were lucky to face Denver and then to see the Ravens miss a kick . . . and in the big game the luck ran out with our offense sputtering without Gronk and our secondary giving up big plays with the game on the line.  Last year, we did well against a faltering Texans team, but were whipped by the Ravens.  You can blame Brady over and over, but what I see is lack of talent in key positions. 

 

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In response to prolate0spheroid's comment:

Yes it has.  It's won us 3.  Yes they were a while ago, but unless you have evidence that Belichick radically changed his strategy as GM in 2005 then you can't discount those 3.

 

Isn't the whole point to try and increase the odds of winning a championship?  I think Belichick recognizes that the playoffs is a bit of a crapshoot because it is single elimination.  So he constructs the team so that we can consistently get a good seed in the playoffs and hopes we play well and get a few bounces that go our way.  When we won 3 out of 4 we had a lot of things go our way from the tuck rule to good health to Kasay kicking the ball out of bounds in the SB.  If Wes holds on or Asante holds on or Tyree doesn't make the helmet catch are we even having this conversation.  Football is a game of inches.  We had those inches in our favor in the early 2000's and they haven't been there for us these past few years.  I don't see that as an indictment of the approach.  Would you stop counting cards in blackjack simply because you got unlucky and didn't win a few hands?  Of course not.

I would also like to point out that the critics seem to take it as a given that we would have won another SB if only stubborn ol Bill had just signed these marquee free agents they wanted.  That is a HUGE assumption.  I mean first of all most of these people don't even specify who it should have been and at what cost, but even if they did it is not nearly a given that the result would have been like they claimed.

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The thing that cracks me up is when someone say trading up in the slotted capped draft year was a stroke of genius...really?? Really? You got to be kidding me? We traded up because in previous years we lost out to players by just sitting there - we needed to be aggressive. It's not like we traded up into the top five! What did we end up saving by trading up four spots in the 20's?! This is the most laughable, ridulous, dumb thing I've ever heard. Yeah, we just saved ourselves probably one tenth of a percent by trading up four slots compared to previous years. Please.