I’ve got a good feeling about those teams, I expect them to go from dumpster fire to mediocre. Which sounds like faint praise, but it could be a stepping stone to actually being good. Though they need better QB play for that.
They sure do. The recent brain drain of departing coaches and staff seem to have hit them hard. I am not optimistic for them this season.
the raiders seem to have done pretty well to middlin’ according to the gurus … what worries me is the coach … will he try to make them the patriots 2.0?
Not so sure about that. i can’t remember the last time the Pats had a draft that wasn’t largely criticized by the pundits or didn’t cause a borderline freakout from hometown fans. It became a meme how bad they were at picking WRs to help Brady. This draft looks more or less like every other Pats draft in recent memory with the exception of the Mac Jones pick.
I watched a fair bit of B1G football this season. I really don’t think Karlaftis is going to produce at all in the pros. He’s just a guy.
I think you’re wrong here. Skipping last year’s very different draft, most of the time the reaction from pundits has been to praise Belichick’s flexibility moving around and trading picks to get good value, and the reaction from most hometown fans has been “I may be skeptical, but In Bill We Trust.”
Looking back at NFL.com, I see the following grades:
2020: C- (reinforces your argument)
2019: A
2018: A
2017: B+
I couldn’t go back any further than that at NFL.com, but all of these drafts were pretty much terrible yet got good grades outside of 2020. And of course everyone loved 2021 with Mac Jones, as we’ve discussed.
You may be right about the grades. Hard to compete with the “Patriot Way” stuff. The Pats are notorious for trading back which tends to be a fairly safe way to get a good grade in the draft. I’m probably filtering it through the number of whiffs the Pats have had at WR and OL over the years in retrospect.
Oh yeah, in retrospect, most of their drafts from the past 5-7 years have been objectively terrible. They’ve missed on just about every position except maybe RB.
The point I was making is that the Pats brain trust, at least as it applies to the draft, has been pathetic for a while. I’m not sure any brain drain can be blamed for this year’s bad grade, this is maybe just the pundits starting to see through the fog to realize that this team has always sucked at this part of the process.
Fair point. This year seemed much more immediately worse to me, but you might be right.
Apparently RG3 is garnering some interest after running a 4.48 40 at a recent charity event. Not sure why. Dude could always run, even after the injury and surgery. What he could never do is read a defense, and that 40 time tells us nothing about that.
“My cousin can run really fast, here is his phone number. We will be eagerly awaiting the offers from NFL teams wanting to sign him as their franchise QB.”
According to RG3s agent…
Here’s a video of the event. He’s running by himself on a football field. It appears that it’s being timed by somebody using a stopwatch. So I might question the accuracy of the 4.48.
I would disagree, He could read a defense well. But after the knee got blown up, he couldn’t get the release to get the ball where it was going for that read. Then when that went south he lost all confidence and got the yips on basic throws.