I'm not sure it was quite that simple, Deus. Carter's recovery was an issue through this summer, and the team did go after Jonathan Fanene, whose undisclosed injury caught the team by surprise. That was a faux pas, but it wasn't a lack of effort.
Carter could have been signed and Francis could have been sent to the Practice squad.
The Waters situation may or may not have been mishandled, but the team had ongoing conversations with him and apparently he turned down a "significant" pay raise offer, at least according to SMY.
The Waters issue is a murky one, because we don't have the info, and I wasn't trying to assign or divy blame in my post, but was just noting that many of the issues would/could/should may have been non-issues. However, having Waters would mean that the interior O-line could have returned intact, with just the tackles being different.
The team loaded up on linemen this offseason, but Matt Light retired, Robert Gallery decided his body couldn't take it any more, and Dan Koppen didn't have enough left in the tank to beat out the current guys on the roster.
Light retired early, Gallery was looking done, and Koppen is now a starter in Denver. Unless they pissed light off, I've got no issue there. I've got no issue with the Gallery situation. I've got an issue with the Koppen situation, since Koppen was clearly (IMO) taking time to come back but improving, but it's one that wouldn't have mattered if Waters were back.
Aaron Hernandez' injury didn't occur until game 2 of the season. And I really don't think that Laron Landry was the solution to our coverage problems in the secondary.
Nothing they could do about the Hernandez injury, but Landry is a better safety than anyone on this team's roster. He's a rich man's Patrick Chung.
I'm not saying that every move was perfect. I'm not sure it's as straightforward as you suggest.
The/some potential solutions to everything except the CB problems were there to be tried. The team couldn't (Waters?), or wouldn't (Waters?, Landry) make the moves needed to bring some in. With others, they chose to pass completely or not to wait on injury rehab (Carter, Gaffney, Koppen), while keeping a 500,000th TE (Shiancoe) around when he had to be shelved for almost half the season.
It's straightforward stuff to me, in the sense of the solution/help player being right in front of them. Now, whether those players would have actually fixed the issues.... that's an unknown. All we can do is watch players like Carter, Koppen, Shiancoe, Landry and Gaffney, and speculate based upon what we see moving forward.
