[soapbox]
It's not polite terminology. It's a manner of ignoring reality. Looking at the gripes about the 2007 'draft' makes that pretty clear. The Patriots don't get all their players through the draft. That's true of almost every team in the NFL. Very few teams go the Steelers/Colts route, and with good reason.
By the way, it's not the fault of the front office that Colvin went from top shelf to JAG almost on day 1 due to injury, that Bruschi suffered a stroke that made him a lesser player, that Thomas suffered injury in each of his first two seasons under contract, or that Wilson and Harrison suffered a series of trauma injuries (breaks, injuries due to cheap shots) that were outside the statistical norm.
Yes, I think that the Seymour and Hobbs trades were terrible moves that have pretty clearly had a negative impact on the team's quality of play this season. Yes, I think that the team foolishly overpaid for Burgess. Yes, I think the team let Vrabel/Cassel go for too little in return (although I give it an overall pass as one friend doing another a "solid" to start his new career). However, to ***** about inaction is just asinine. Mistakes were made, but they were not due to inaction or a lack of attention: they were made because of poor thinking on the part of the front office.
Despite what people on message boards for almost every team seem to think, coordinators really do tend to know what they are doing, bad players really do impact coaching decisions, injuries really do impact teams, owners really do tend to pull the trigger too quickly rather than too slowly, and teams like the Patriots remain on top because they generally do a superior job of procuring talent and coaching it up, and combine that with superior quarterback play. While the homers on boards need to realize that nobody is perfect, the complainers need to realize that, while nobody is perfect, the necessary codicil to that is that lack of perfection does not necessarily show complete incompetence. Even the greats screw up.
Hell, the Patriots finished the season at 10-6 and, yet, had Welker not gone down with his injury, New England would still have been considered one of the Super Bowl favorites, even with all the mistakes the team made this year. That's not bad considering how much change has occurred in one season and how many mistakes were made during that time.
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