It will be interesting to see how they use the ammo this year vs. last. I've said this elsewhere (and will doubtless say it a lot more by April!
) but the draft and the roster both look dramatically different for 2011. The Pats should be loaded with young depth at pretty much every position except the interior OL. Role players are all present and accounted for, so going all out for a couple of difference-makers in round 1 could make sense.
I completely agree with patchick.
Ah, but the ever-fastidious Sister PatChick posed a
theoretical, as she is wont to do: "Going all out for a couple of difference-makers in Round 1
could make sense."
The good lady's acumen is, quite arguably, on par with no less than that of Coach Bill,
himself.
But so, indeed, is her
circumspection.
There are only so many roster sports, even if they are expanded with an 18 game schedule, and there is already a young core in place. What would be the benefit of adding another 10 or 12 draft picks to the current roster? Sure you add more competition and improve some of the lower roster spots, but I believe fewer, higher caliber players at the top of the draft would have more impact. I think with the way the roster is set out that this is the year we could see the Pats move up to get more high end talent.
We have here an interesting philosophical divergence, my friend.
Only 4 impact players on the 2001 team ~
Willie McGinest, Damien Woody, Richard Seymour, and
Emperor Tyraneus ~ were 1st Rounders. And not a one of them were generally considered Super Stars.
My Argument is that it was only with the eruption of our Dynasty...that many of our players became
perceived as Super Stars.
My Argument, indeed, is that the league is
festooned with hidden gems: Players with the requisite combination of Talent and Heart to become
Stars...most of whom
ultimately fail to do so,
because there are so few Coaching staffs who are adept in unlocking and unleashing their skills.
I believe that the notion of "Talent" is, generally,
spectacularly misjudged by the vast majority of media, who ~ unable to explain how a bad team suddenly became great in one year, as in our case ~ write it off to an inexplicable spike in "Talent", while ignoring how god-awfully ridiculous the assertion is...and missing what I consider to be an unfathomably under-appreciated concept: How
dramatic the impact on a team's performance of one great Coach can
be.
But I don't presume to know the genesis of your thoughts on this, Brother Wilfork, my esteemed collaborator.
My point ~ at
last!! ~ is this: I believe that for three reasons, Coach Bill is actually better off
continuing his Trade Down approach:
1 ~ Salary Cap Strategy gives an HUGE advantage to an Army consisting of a large number of small but powerfull weapons.
Our extraordinary Depth of Talent gives us an immense ~ albeit: rarely mentioned or understood ~ advantage, over the long haul: The number of utterly vital contributions from guys WAY down the Depth Chart, over the years, has been ENORMOUS. And even with the Greatest QuarterBack in the Galaxy going down, two years ago, we would've won our Divsion ~
and quite possibly gone all the way against a week field ~ if the current Tie Breakers system wasn't such an ATROCITY.
2 ~ It has become shockingly obvious, the last 2 years, that Coach Bill ~ left to his own devices ~ is an AMAZING Prospector.
This thus lends an enormous additional value to those mid and late round Picks that ~ for most teams ~ are long shots and lottery tickets.
3 ~ I believe that Super Stars are not only not needed to build an elite team...
I believe they are
harmfull, because they attract a Gravitational Pull that even
Coach Bill and
General Brady have proven to have difficulty resisting. And that directly distracts a team from the
Ball Control + Tenacious D focus that is absolutely
essential to winning Super Bowls. You'll remember: Our other 2 1st Rounders, in 2001, were
Drew Bledsoe and
Terry Glenn.
And as soon as we dropped them both, the team took off like a ROCKET.
In my opinion, that wasn't even
remotely a coincidence.