Monday 9/30/24
I don't know if the Patriots are the worst team in the NFL, but I do know they're close. The main reason for that is simple: There's no talent on the roster. They hardly have anyone anywhere who is an above-average NFL player. Most are below. The offensive line situation is dire. I don't know why they were so adamant about drafting a quarterback. A quarterback can be a magic fix, but that's very rare.
To me, when you're so weak all over the field on both sides of the ball, you focus more on building up the roster talent--which can mean trading down in the draft--than you do on hoping to hit it big on a quarterback. The Patriots aren't working with a viable NFL roster. What they are now has been a long time coming. It goes back to the end of the Brady years, when one guy was largely making it all work, holding it together. They drafted poorly, they couldn't entice free agents, they certainly didn't sign the right free agents. They got fat and lazy.
I don't think ownership understood what was making the team successful those last few years of success. The Krafts bought into this self-invented mythology about themselves and that hasn't helped. This goes back to 2017 or so. I'm not sure what you do now. You have to turn the whole operation over--turn the roster over--as you go.
These Patriots are similar to those early 1990s Patriots team. Eventually, Bill Parcells and Drew Bledsoe came along. There was a Hall of Fame running back in Curtis Martin and a great receiving talent in Terry Glenn and the NFL's premiere receiving tight end--for a time--in Ben Coates. But that's what it took. And that was a lot.
The current Patriots are so far off that I can't even guess when they'll be good again, but it feels pretty far out there. Years away. Perhaps a lot of years.
I question whether Jerod Mayo is the real coach of this team. I think he might be a figurehead in large measure, with a half dozen people calling the shots and a pecking order with that half dozen that has Mayo closer to the bottom than the top. I watched his postgame press conference after the game yesterday and I thought he handled himself well. He knows the OC and this quarterback are holding back the team, but he wasn't tearing them down. I'm convinced he wants to be playing Drake Maye and has been vetoed.
Jacoby Brissett is not an NFL calibre quarterback in 2024. He can't do anything out there. He can't move the ball down the field. His "strength"--insofar as he has one--is getting up after getting hit. The coaches compliment him on this. Talk about a left-handed compliment, though I think they're actually trying to praise him. It's like someone who isn't good at their job and someone else saying, "Well, you come in every day!"
He's not good enough to be in the league. If you say he is, okay, that's fine, but it would only be because so many guys can't play that position well right now and there has to be X amount of quarterbacks in the league. It's not like being an Original Sox goalie in the NHL when all of those guys were good because there were six goalies in North America who comprised the total of starters in a major professional sports league.
I have, obviously, real horrors to contend with and awful things going on, with no let up, so there's a lot of perspective in my world, but silly sports-wise, the Patriots are depressing. Watching them is dispiriting. What are you watching? A bad team that's not interesting in any way with players and coaches who in all probability will be long gone the next time a Patriots team is competitive again. Just competitive. Not a contender.
And though he's gone, Belichick has plenty to do with this state of affairs. He did real long-term damage to this franchise in his final half dozen or so years. I wonder if people are going to realize that or remember it later on if they do.
I also didn't like how much peacocking the Patriots--players and staff--were doing after that opening week win, talking about running "the hill" at training camp and boasting about their fitness. I thought they'd win that game--as I wrote here--and it's a good thing they did, because it removed the possibility of the winless season. I never thought that would happen with so many bad teams in the league, but you don't want that hanging over your head as a season goes along.
It's cosmetic, though. 1-16 or 4-13, it'll amount to the same thing with this team, the difference being where they draft. I don't know how they didn't address their left tackle problem. You can't play Brissett because he can't play, but you've boxed yourself into that corner. You're telling your fanbase you're just going to get mauled every week and everyone has to suck it up and accept one of the worst years in franchise history, if not the worst.
But why? Because you don't want Drake Maye getting hurt or having his development impeded? But Brissett is likely going to get hurt anyway and you'll have to play Maye. What I'm saying is, if there was a plan in place, it was an unreasonable, illogical plan.
Did they really think that Brissett would be a legitimate approximation of a starting quarterback? I never thought he would be. This guy has been around. You know what he is. I knew what he was the first time he was in New England. He's a journeyman back-up, and it doesn't take much to be an NFL back-up QB. You can be bad at playing that position and stick around. Jed Hoyer, for example.
I think the Krafts are getting a measure of comeuppance for their arrogance. Those two guys thought they were "all that" as the kids say, or used to, and they never had a clue. They tried to credit themselves. Robert in particular is a credit stealer. A needy credit stealer. Tom Brady was more than the best player in the sport's history. He was a guy who could make the overall operation work--which included covering up the holes--like no one else in any sport.
The Krafts thought they had something to do with this, and that it was organizational. A result, in large part, of the organization they had in place, but that had so very little to do with it in reality. Early on, it was the culture, the coach, Hall of Famers on defense, big play guys, the offensive line coach, and the quarterback. But it wasn't the organization or an ethos or football philosophies turned into on-the-field realities after those first few years--up through 2004--as much as it was the quarterback and a few other things.
Another observation about Brissett: He sounds clueless to me. Not serious. Happy to be there. You win some you lose some. Life goes on. I don't think we're talking the heart of a lion here.
What do I think they should have done? Tried to build up the roster rather than selecting a quarterback no matter what. Brought in a quarterback with something to prove, or a guy whose career had taken a setback and who needed a fresh start--which amounts to the same idea--and tried to be competitive while instilling a culture and an attitude. I say this not knowing what Drake Maye is going to be, but odds are he won't be very good, right? That's how it usually goes. Is he that one out of fifteen or twenty who is decent? What are the chances he's elite? I get it, what are the chances anyone is elite, and yet there's Patrick Mahomes.
So, yes, to be technical about it, he could be this Hall of Fame type of quarterback. I don't believe you draft a quarterback as this intended solution to all of your problems. Or most of them. The teams that do that tend to do it a bunch, and they're moribund franchises until they smarten up or they get lucky or, most likely, both. The Lions brought in Goff. He's not some Hall of Famer, but he can win games, obviously, and he proved that he was "sneaky good," if you will, by which I mean, he had more game than people thought.
The quarterback position is also becoming less important. I know, that sounds crazy. It's a quarterback league! But look at these games. Look at the offensive stats. The passing yards. The scores. You can--for now, at least, until rules changes get made to boost offense--win in more ways than you could in recent years. That's been going on fro a bit now. What is always true about football, though, is this: You can't win without an offensive line and you'll be very hard pressed to be a good team without strong line play on both sides of the ball. It always comes back to who controls the line of scrimmage. As it was in 1934, so it is now. And it's always going to be that way with football.
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