The Captain has been pretty vocal about his position of unquestioningly supporting every decision Bill Belichick makes in this draft and has largely been his response to a free agency period that left a lot of Patriots fans scratching their heads. I don't think that this is a bad position to take and I drink plenty of the BB Kool Aid myself. Bill's personnel decisions work out a reasonable amount of the time and if not he usually puts himself in a position where he didn't really lose much, cuts the player and moves on. I also think sometimes people forget that his job in getting value out of the draft is harder when you're consistently getting natural picks that fall in the later part of the round almost every season. The lost first rounder to Spygate was a significant setback as well. The Captain is also correct that Boston is not a college football town. Most of the fans and sports media in this town, myself included, might know a little about BC football but not much else. That said, our opinions on these high level prospects coming out of college aren't derived from throwing at a dart board. I recognize that Bill has expertise in this field, but I recognize that other well informed people have formed and publicized their opinions on these players and Bill's selections as well and don't agree with the course/players he has taken. These media personalities get it wrong a reasonable percentage of the time, but Bill has also made plenty of picks that looking back haven't panned out.
The Captain's go to must answer question in his criticism of those who are critical of Bill is "Who would you take at 29?", but there's more to the equation than that prior to being put on the clock with the 29th pick. None of the talent at 29 was particularly exciting, but there did seem to be some highly regarded talent that projected to contribute immediately higher up in the draft and this was reportedly a buyer's market. This puts me in the unfortunate position of speculation, but what would it have cost for the Patriots to move up into picks 1-8 and get somebody like Tavon Austin? That's a question I'm never going to be able to answer definitively, but based on the reports of teams wanting to move down I believe there may have been a bargain to be had here. I'm just using Austin as an example here because I think wide receiver is a position of need and Austin was well regarded by talent experts, but I think there had to be somebody in this draft that was a high probability elite player that would have been a significant upgrade at a position of need and the Patriots could have sacrificed some later picks to move up and get him.
The problem I have with the Patriots approach to this draft is that they approached it in a way that would better suit a rebuilding team or a team with a lot of holes. I would really like the Patriots trade down if I were the Ravens. The Ravens had a mass exodus of players after winning the Super Bowl and they don't have the cap room to fill all the holes it seems. Trading a quality elite player for a quantity of competent warm bodies would make a lot of sense in that situation. After the free agency period and coming into the draft I feel like the Patriots are a mostly complete team and upgrading to an elite player at a position of need could be what puts them over the top. Instead of that I feel like we got some more depth and lottery tickets. This is all compounded by the fact that Tom Brady is getting older and I think everything possible should be done to maximize the opportunity to win a championship while he is still here. I think Tom himself realized this when he agreed to such a team friendly deal for what will most likely be the remainder of his NFL career.
I also don't understand why Bill seems to get so aggressive to pick players that nobody else seems to be interested in. As a coach who seems to place such a high value on draft picks it's strange to see him burn them on players that are projected to go much later in the draft or go undrafted altogether. I can understand that maybe he/his scouts see something in a player that other teams/scouts don't, but why not try to maximize that advantage? Was he really that concerned that somebody was going to swoop in and get Tavon Wilson from him that he needed to burn the 48th overall pick to get him? People were projecting him as being a 7th rounder. You could snag him with a 4th or 5th rounder just to be on the safe side and still net a huge amount of value. The same could be said of the Duron Harmon pick this year. Maybe the Sports media completely misread the market on both of these guys and I was satisfied with Wilson's contribution as a rookie last year, but it seems like a significant value loss for minimal risk. It's possible that Bill knew something everybody else didn't about other teams being interested in these guys, but barring that he either misread or disregarded the market demand for these players.
I'm not incensed by any of these picks or think that they're serious errors in judgment by any stretch, but the picks don't make much sense to me and knowing Bill I don't think we're ever going to really get his actual thought process behind his picks which will make it more frustrating.
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