It's not my job to fill those positions. It's Bill's and he's extremely well paid for it. If he didn't have any ideas then shame on him, not on me or any of the other fans that pay the freight.
Fair enough. It's just odd to me when someone says they shouldn't have hired X rather than they should have hired Y. But that can work against both sides of the argument so point taken.
Give me an example of fans railing against a move by Bill that worked. This one didn't. Neither did 4th and 2 or benching Butler in the SB. He also took his players heads out of a playoff game vs the Jets when he benched Welker at the start of the game for making jokes.
Cutting Lawyer Milloy, not calling a timeout at the end of SB49, drafting Devin McCourty when Dez Bryant was still on the board are a few off the top of my head. But that's not even the point. In a 20 year career (with New England) you're going to find examples of good and bad decision making, it's inevitable. The point was that just because people don't like it, doesn't mean it's automatically the wrong call. And I cannot stress this enough: This one WAS the wrong call. I'm not arguing that.
It wasn't just McDaniels that Bill wasn't ready to replace. The same thing happened at other positions, only those were impact players and not merely coaches, all lost because of money.
See, this falls back into the fallacy of it being strictly about money. They don't lose good players because they don't want to pay them. They lose good players because they're operating under a salary cap and sometimes that means tough decisions. Yes, there are ways to move cap money around, but those are not like putting in a cheat code in a video game. There are limits to how much maneuvering you can do before the bill comes due, which leads me to...
From what I've read and heard, in real money spent the Pats are near the bottom of the league. And we have no idea how much Bill or any of the coaches are making. That works in keeping the criticism to the players and not the good old boys on the sideline.
I would love to see a source on this, because every report about this that I see is usually covering a small sample size (like three years or so). The way contracts are structured, money isn't paid out evenly over the course of a player's term. So there are going to be some years where actual cash spending is higher than the cap number, and vice versa. For example, a player signs a two year deal for 20 million, split up between a 12 million signing bonus then 4 mill per year in salary. You'll look at the first year and say, "Wow, they paid that guy $16million!" then the next year they're only "paying" him $4million. So when you look at "cash spending" in year two, it looks like they're cheaping out, when really they just paid a boatload upfront.
As a result of 53+ guys on a roster, all with contracts of varying values, lengths, and structures, the cash spending of a team is going to fluctuate wildly over whatever span of time you choose to sample. They spend up close to the cap every year, and despite what some may think, there is NO way to spend to the cap without eventually paying all of that money out, whether it be for players who are still here, or on dead money for players who have left. The bill always comes due. You can argue with how they use that money to structure the roster, and that's fair game. But they're not cheap and never have been.
