The strange turns of the 2017 spilled over into the offseason once again yesterday with Tom E. Curran writing that Rob Gronkowski was in fact unhappy with football this season dating all the way back to training camp. In retrospect this article from Ryan Hannable is even more interesting.
There were rumors of Gronk wanting to retire, to maybe give WWE a try instead, just after the Super Bowl but I mostly dismissed those as just being end-of-disappointing-year grumblings. But when taken as part of the big picture of the Pats 2017 season and it’s hard not to think things were different behind the scenes this year, no matter how much you do or don’t want to buy into the old Seth Wickersham piece, the rumors about Brady, Guerrero, Kraft, Belichick, Malcolm Butler and now even Curran’s piece about Gronk.
For the most part, fans want to dismiss these things because distrusting the media is all the rage these days, but there’s so much smoke from a variety of places that it feels like something most definitely was off with this team. Here we are, 17 years in, and the closest kind of contemptuous season to 2017 came in 2009.
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