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The Pats did make a bad move, but it wasn't playing hard ball per se. It was failing to realize that DB so unhappy and therefore letting Givens walk without so much as a backwards glance. The Branch shenanigans seemed to take them completely by surprise; it's hard to believe they didn't see it coming in some way and couldn't have headed it off, either by making a good offer to Givens or by bolstering their receiving corps in a better way before the start of the season.
What is so difficult for the people here to understand about how Belioli works? They have a system in play which does not believe in paying "a" money to "b" or even "a-" players. That means that it would have been a mistake to actually pay those two receivers what they were demanding, because it would have destroyed the sytem. As a man named Lawyer Milloy discovered, this team doesn't like bloated contracts. Givens was given #1 receiver money for a #2/#3 type of receiver, and Branch was given Franchise receiver money for a low end #1/high end #2 receiver. Well, neither one is exactly earning that money and the Patriots are 10-4 without them, haven't set a precedent for the other players to point to and have 2 first round picks in next year's draft along with an additional compensatory pick for Givens.
Mistake? It was a stroke of genius under the circumstances.