I understand the frustration and concern, but I think a lot of Pats fans have seriously unrealistic expectations for Belichick's success rate in the draft. Every team in the league has a laundry list of guys they picked in the 2nd and 3rd rounds that their fans got excited about, but who never panned out. We just happen to be more intimately familiar with out own disappointments.
Looking over the corners taken in the 2nd and 3rd rounds in '07, '08 and '09, it looks like hardly 1 in 10 ever were anything but JAGs or washouts.
Ultimately, there just aren't enough good corners in the league. So GMs and coaches just roll their dice and strike out more often then not. When the occasional team does end up with more than one decent corner on their team, it's likely as not a matter of luck.
I mean, on the Packers, Tramon Williams and Sam Shields were both undrafted, so if any of the other 31 teams had any interest in them during the draft, the Packers never get them. And the fact that Woodson is still remotely effective at this age is just nuts, considering all the wear on his tires.
The Bengals actually managed to have a talented tandem of home-grown corners for a couple years, but they did have to spend successive 1st round picks on them. And considering it's the Bengals we're talking about, I'm going to go ahead and assume that it was a sun shining on a dogs' ***** type situation.
Getting away from corners for a bit, let's talk about the recent spate of terrible 1st round picks by the Colts. The guy was on a 1st round streak for the ages, taking Tarik Glenn, Marvin Harrison, Peyton Manning, Edge James, Reggie Wayne, Dwight Freeney and Dallas Clark in successive drafts, with Rob Morris the only bust thrown in there. Since then, they've absolute crap value for their 1st round picks.
Now, Bill Polian is as big a douchebag as you'll find in the NFL, but the man has been a whiz at draft prospect projection everywhere he's been in his career. So did he suddenly forget how to draft? Did he have a pact with a devil that ran out? Or is it a combination of the fact that the Colts were regularly picking at the bottom of drafts of late (much like the Pats, actually) and, most importantly, that the previous level of success was just simply not sustainable.
The sporting press spends so much time selling fans a seriously distorted sense of determinism in sports. When a coach wins a couple titles, he's called a genius or a mastermind, so when the titles dry up, clearly, it's because so has his 'genius' right? Problem is, a lot more dumb good luck figured into the glory days than we'd like to admit, and these days, the dumb luck has just be so-so. People would rather believe the narratives of deterministic brains, grit and will, because it masks the inherent absurdity of the amount of time and emotion we sink into what amounts to the product of a huge chaos-driven random outcome generator.
