A couple of high-risk, high-reward third rounders don't pan out, and suddenly that means the Pats can't draft WRs? What WRs are asked to do in college is miles apart from what the Patriots ask them to do, so of course it's going to be difficult to project them into this offense.
It sucked that Chad Jackson worked out, and I still don't really understand what happened there, but sometimes picks just don't pan out. Price, though, was a project who had played his college career in a high-school offense, which made it difficult to project his abilities to the pros. He could have been a diamond in the rough, or he could have been nothing. Tate, similarly, was coming off of a major injury. Sometimes those picks work out (Gronk), sometimes they don't. It is what it is.
What I really don't get, though, is people making sweeping declarations about the team's ability to draft an entire position based on a sample size of three or four mid-round failures. Up until Gronk and Hernandez, everyone said they couldn't draft tight ends. Before that, people were saying that they couldn't draft linebackers (some still say this) right up until Mayo and Spikes came through. Sometime, probably soon, the Pats are going to draft another David Givens, and suddenly most will forget about all of this. Name a position, and I'll name players who were drafted and didn't make it here. It's not because the Pats are incapable of drafting these positions; that's just how it goes.
To the OP's credit, ALP is an insightful poster who I enjoy reading, definitely not trying to call him out individually or anything. This was one of the better-expressed takes on this line of reasoning that I've seen (and we see a lot of them), but I still just fundamentally disagree with it.
