lol because trading up in the 2nd and 3rd is the same as sitting put in the top 10.
Well, when you do as well as the Pats have in the last decade, you never get a chance to stay put in the top ten - if you stay put, it's more like in the last ten or so.
The original comment was that 'Bill will trade down... he always does.' I guess I missed the fine print that there were conditions to that comment, which has now been repeated so often it is accepted as fact, that the discussion was limited to only the first round.
So, how then does one explain ten first round draft picks in ten years (plus one more that was taken away by Goodell)? I mean, if he "always trades down", wouldn't it be more like three or four first round picks in ten years?
But if you only want to look at first round picks, fine.
In the last ten years the Pats under Belichick have traded up in the first round to select Daniel Graham and Ty Warren. They stayed where they were to get Richard Seymour, Ben Watson, Logan Mankins, and Laurence Maroney.
I suppose trading a first round pick for another pick and a future first round pick falls under the "trading down" umbrella in some eyes - though I'm not sure that's accurate, since they technically move up to an earlier pick. I guess that means trading away that '03 pick to Baltimore, which they used on Kyle Boller, was horrible since it meant the Pats had to wait a year to get Vince Wilfork (and were able to add Eugene Wilson and Dan Klecko in the process.) Jerod Mayo was another first round pick made available by trading into the following season.
It's only been in the last two years that the team flat-out traded down. In 2009 that picked turned into Darius Butler, Brandon Tate, Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman. The 2010 pick turned into Devin McCourty, Taylor Price and Aaron Hernandez.
Now perhaps you can make the argument that Michael Oher or Clay Matthews would be better for the Pats than those first four players, or that Dez Bryant would be better than the other three, but that's probably better left as a separate discussion in another thread for another day - about three years from now. However this often repeated statement that 'Belichick always trades down, he never trades up' is a myth.
