If you asked me which one is easier to fix, I'd say our current situation is easier to fix.
I don't think our situation is fixable. Certainly not for this year, that's clear.
The problem is for future years. Gilmore has little trade value at this point, so if he's traded we'll eat the $32M or so remaining on his K.
Unfortunately for that option, the Gilmore signing has signalled to other players that teamwork and football intelligence are not valued, at least financially. So players are not going to work with the team, but instead on their own stats; nor will they give the Patriots a discount. And the loss of this season will make it that much harder to recruit.
All of this was utterly obvious to me and to anyone else who looked at the Gilmore signing objectively. That it wasn't obvious to the Patriots staff is profoundly concerning, maybe even more concerning than Gilmore's play. I called what's happening on the field now pretty precisely many times in the preseason: the team is playing like a team without chemistry, which is precisely what I said Gilmore's signing would do. And I'm hardly a football expert - so why couldn't the Pats staff see this?
In conclusion, I don't see a path to recovery, for a minimum of seven or eight years. Basically Gilmore's contract is going to have to expire and then there will have to be a rebuilding. That's assuming, optimistically, that this Gilmore signing was a one-off, $40M error. But if we take a pessimistic, worst case scenario, and if we posit that the Gilmore signing was not a one-off error but was instead a symptom of a change in the decision-making process or efficiency of the organization, then we are talking about decades, not years, to recover. However, there is insufficient information yet to suggest that this latter scenario applies.
