Archives for April 15, 2014

I definitely agree that playing for the Patriots isn’t for everyone. Tedy Bruschi calls it a “Football Academy” and it’s an environment where every last detail is about winning football games. If you’re not obsessed with being your best and being part of a team, you might not like it there. 

For some guys, it’s cathartic to be in an environment like that. Many veterans enjoy being in a place where it is only about football after spending the first chunk of their careers in other franchises.

Belichick was raised at Navy and those are the kind of people and players he was around as a kid and I think that very much influences the kind of organization and players he wants.

A player like Spikes certainly marches to his own beat, and I loved watching him play. I’m not sure there was another defender, outside of maybe Talib, who was as good at one thing as Spikes was at destroying a opposing run game. But falling into line, sacrificing his desire to express himself, those kind of things just weren’t Spikes. Nothing against him, perhaps he’ll blossom even more when he can feel totally free.

But the fact is that when you put a team together of essentially “football nerds” they are very, very hard to beat. They are always well-prepared, don’t get rattled, and it takes a full game to beat them. A legit 60 minutes and nothing less. They’ll beat far more talented teams and they’ll come back on teams that let up once they have a 10-point lead. 

We’ve seen it time and time again, with almost entirely different Patriots teams.

Almost every team wants to call themselves a team-first operation but very few really are. The Patriots definitely are.

How will Revis respond in that kind of environment? I’m not sure. It might be perfect for him. Or it might be too much. We’ll just have to let the season play out.

More time for more mock drafts and misinformation! The pre-draft period was already annoyingly long before they pushed the draft back into May. It’s no accident that suddenly players who have been atop the rankings all year are suddenly getting destroyed by “scouts” and “sources”. A lot of this is done to try and affect draft stock, most often by teams who want that player.

I don’t love the draft like a lot of people out there. I’ll be far more happy once I can jump in and evaluate the players the Pats pick up, rather than trying to pick a few random needles out of the haystack and try to explain why they will be who the Pats select, when really, they’re probably not selecting them.

I’m not a trained scout. I don’t watch college football film all day. The bit I do watch are YouTube cutups that give little context. I do think I know the kind of players the Pats like and I do my best to find those types of players, but I could do without the surrounding hype leading up to the draft and much of the online draftnik community, especially those who think they have it all figured out.

I don’t think so, he probably fits more of a Will linebacker prototype, so if he’s redundant to anyone it’s probably Mayo.

My love/hate relationship with Mayo has been well-chronicled here. Despite his elite athleticism, I’ve just always felt he lacks that special something in coverage that the less-athletic Bruschi had. We’re entering year seven with him and there’s no question he’s the brains of the defense, but really how much worse off were they without him for most of last year? Hard to say for sure, but there weren’t many “man, if only we had Mayo” sentiments out there.

So the short answer is that I’ll take any defensive front seven player BB deems worthy in the first round, be it a defensive tackle, end or linebacker. And I don’t think it’s out of the question to take a player who could potentially back-up, and eventually maybe replace, Mayo.