If people expected Maroney to be Corey Dillon 2.0, then that's their problem. He wasn't drafted to be that, and he was never going to be that. From day one, Maroney has been part of a running back committee. I can't read Belichick's mind, but I think the reason why is pretty obvious: because he saw what 2004 did to Corey Dillon. There's a reason why the feature RB has gone the way of the dinosaur, and there's a reason why the few teams that still rely on a feature RB tend to do all of jack**** once the playoffs roll around. In the modern NFL, RBs can't absorb that kind of punishment over the course of a full season. Defenders are too big, the game is too fast, and the hits are too hard.
Seriously, when's the last time that a team won a SB on the strength of an offense that was driven by one workhorse RB? You could maybe make a case for 2004 with Dillon (and, as I mentioned before, that came at great cost to Dillon and, therefore the team over the next couple years), but other than that you're going back to 1998. Teams that rely on one RB to the extent that you guys want to see Maroney used have one thing in common- those RBs get hurt, the offense stalls, and they go out with a whimper in the playoffs. Don't believe me? Go look at the list of the top rushers in the NFL in each of the last few years, and let's talk about how their teams did once the playoffs rolled around, and they suddenly found that their top weapon was a shell of himself.
The standard that you guys are holding Maroney to is one that very, very few RBs achieve in the modern NFL. In fact, if you go back through all of the first-round RBs picked in the last 5 years, *most* of them will be busts by the standards that you've set up for Maroney, and a lot of those guys were picked 10-15 spots ahead of him. Let me know next time a team with a 1500 yard rusher wins a SB- I'm pretty sure that it won't be happening for a long, long time.
