Why Didn't the Patriots Take More Linebackers?
One of the biggest things discussed since the end of draft weekend was the fact that linebacker was not a focus of this year's draft.
They took Tyrone McKenzie from South Florida with the 97th overall selection, but McKenzie was the only one selected, leaving people wondering how in the world can Belichick overlook so many guys at a position that right now fans believe has so many question marks?
It's simple. As we've all heard over the years that position is one of the most complex in Belichick's defensive schemes and one that requires a skillset and intelligence level that simply doesn't fit everyone. Up until last year's selection of Jerod Mayo, it had been a position that for the most part had been addressed via free agency, as Belichick had instead opted to rely on smart veterans and their experience rather than go with a rookie. There's no question that all of us would love to see another Mayo on this football team, but the scouting department obviously saw film on each and every one of the guys available. They know far more about each of those players than any of us could ever hope to, and if after making the evaluations Belichick felt he didn't fit, you simply don't draft him. You don't take a guy in a bad draft who ends up not fitting just for the sake of drafting him. You also don't spend a pick on a player that you don't think can play. Hence the reason why they traded out of the first round. No point in paying a guy first round money with second or third round skills.
So for now all we can do is sit back and wait to see how it all unfolds, but fans have to simply look at how this team has been built and understand the reasoning behind each of those decisions. It's obviously more important to bring in guys who can play at other positions in leu of taking a chance on someone at another position who can't.
It may sound like I'm stating the obvious, but knowing what we've seen from Belichick over the years, that's just the way he works. Fortunately for the most part it's all worked out just fine.
Pats 'Tweeted' Faster than Goodell Could Announce Them
The Patriots released their draft choices via their official channel Saturday night, and much to the suprise of many actually had them posted on Twitter (inlcuding trades) before it actually happened on television. I haven't seen any articles yet regarding the league stepping in to curb this, but it definitely lead to a more interactive experience for fans being directly connected to the "war room". It was interesting to say the least.
A Busy Weekend at PatsFans.com
Between battling the flu and making sure the message board survived the onslaught of people, I spent most of Saturday night working with the server company to keep things running. We had an record 5,000 people simultaneously accessing the forum and website at one point during Saturday evening's draft. That had database requests of almost 400 per second, which is what caused the intermittant errors. We were having to restart mysql service each time we got overloaded, which may have been why most of you noticed that the number of active users number kept resetting on the main page.
After it was over I worked with the head technician into Saturday night/Sunday morning, and we modified some configuration settings reccomended by the folks at vBulletin to better accomodate the forum queries. I had them monitor us again on Sunday, and this time we experienced a smoother day despite some early glitches which required a couple more tweaks early on, but things definitely seemed to run a bit better. Upon looking at the logs we also discovered a couple of sites who were "scraping" content and eating up resources, and blocked them from accessing the server.
For anyone interested between the two days the site did over a half million page views, with almost 40,000 fans visiting the site over the weekend. It was a busy weekend, so thank you to everyone who took part and dealt with the inconveniences.
