Fencer

Sorry, not playing your rhetorical games.

However, I concede, resign, and withdraw from any "biggest prick" competition with you.

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Deus Irae

You wrote the O.P.. It's your thread. You've made the claim. Now back it up. Please list the "impact" veteran free agents that have been brought in over the course of the last 5 years, using the method you're pimping.

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BB4PRez

I agree with the premise of the thread

How many high price free agents have become high impact game changers with the new team ?

I give Green Bay credit that the hit it out of the park way back when with Reggie White. I thnk Peppers has been a hit with Chicago (bit of a trend with superstar d linemen). Obviosusly qb is another position wher a superstar is worth the big bucks. I am sure there are many I am missing - but there have been a lot of misses

Carter, Anderson, Waters - solid hits

Ocho, Haynesworth - misses but not bank breakers

To me the risk of injury is to great in football in most instances to go for the high priced free agent in a salary cap league

JoeSixPat

Belichick has always paid more attention to the middle class quality depth players than other teams, but I wouldn't want to take that too far and say that's the key to his success.

Other teams like the Colts have often put all their salary cap eggs in just a few baskets and when injuries hit, we've seen that come back to haunt them.

Guys like Waters last year weren't part of a master plan - that was part luck and necessity and it worked out well for the Patriots, and it usually isn't that difficult to find cap space for a guy like that. Other backups that need to start due to injury often demonstrate that they can fill key roles for the Patriots pretty well - again that shouldn't be a surprise because Belichick likes to round out the team with "his kind of players"

But the truth is, in the NFL today, having an elite QB covers up a lot of inadequacies on both offense and defense, and as much as I do credit Belichick for his football genius, he got lucky with Brady in the 6th round, and that counts for a heckuva lot of this team's success. And of course Brady's salary is FAR from middle class.

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The Scrizz

Um, Wes Welker (RFA granted and you can argue that it was a trade but that was just Mr. Kraft being nice to the league with all of the poison pill contracts going around) but probably the best value in football over the last 5 years.

Who was the biggest FA of that time period? Everybody here, including me, was ecstatic. And ADT turned out to be a tremendous bust.

And yet somehow this team that only brings in crappy FA's instead of 'impact' players, constantly trades back for more picks instead of drafting 'impact' players, and is cheap (despite constantly being at the top in real money paid out) has not finished with fewer than 10 wins since 2002, including 11-5 without Tom Brady. They've been in 5 out of 11 Super Bowls.

What more exactly, do you want? There are 31 other teams that draft football players and play games and try to win and the Pats have done it better than every one of them for over a decade and still people aren't happy because they don't do it the way you want them to.

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I was like, ‘Dang! Um, Mr. Brady, can we line up?’ He didn’t care. He was like, ‘You’re not going to line up.’ When we turned around one time I checked back around and my hand was going to the grass and they were like, ‘Hut!’ And I said, ‘Noooooooooooo!’

Fencer

5 years -- then we get to add Welker. (And yes, I understand Kraft ordered BB to turn that deal into a trade -- but he still was a FA acquisition for all practical purposes.)

That's without playing semantic games around Moss (trade), Gaffney (how much impact would he have had w/o the Moss trade?), and so on.

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Fencer

Neither would I. It's one key of many.

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"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness." -- Oscar Wilde

Deus Irae

Welker was a trade. Gaffney was in 2006. So, in 5 years, it's 3 "Impact" players, and all 3 of them were in the same year. That's really nothing to write home about, given the number of misses that were also involved.

The reality is that there is no one right way to do it, and that spending money on the high end free agents might, or might not, have been more successful for the Patriots over the course of the past 5 seasons. We'll never know which would have worked out better, but your dismissal of the high end free agent approach is clearly not supported by the recent success rate of your preferred system.

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Joey007

I'm a guy that believes in winning the Super Bowl (building your team) in the draft, give it help in FA. So while I don't have a problem with signing a big name FA guy, teams usually win SB's with biggest pieces from the draft, and smaller pieces from vet FA's. As a good example when we signed a mid-class guy Corey Dillon; turned out he helped us win our 3rd Super Bowl.

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Stevan Ridley. Bringing back the art of running the football back to New England since 2011.

IllegalContact

As in other threads, I've said that it's not necessarily about spending big money, but this point is flat out stupid.

Last year was an anomaly.

Look at the difference between cheaping out on WRs in 2006, then going on a spending spree in 2007.

As for 2003 and 2004, the pats did plenty of spending then, too.....dillon, Harrison,Colvin, not to mention laying out plenty of big contracts to keep their defensive players (vrable, mcginest, law, Seymour)

Cheap FAs fizzle more often than succeed.

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