1) Yes. I believe that the number was about $7M. Pushing money forward has been SOP for decades.
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Pushing forward every player, or the same player 3 years in a row is not.
So your plan would be to save 7 mill you put Gilmore into 20 mill of dead money next year. What would you do with 7 mill in 2020 that makes up for ensuring your best player is gone and costs you 20 mill in 2021.
I don’t think you understand “SOP”. It does not mean something you do in certain cases is to be done in all cases.
2) Your nitpicking is correct Belichick certainly wanted to win. There were no guarantees that if he improve the team with 3 additional players that we would have been in the playoffs.
His is quoting your words “nitpicking”. If 3 players for a total of 7 million would decide at least 4 games, despite an albatross qb around the neck, then our 60 mill in cap space should have us undefeated for the next 5 years.
He CHOSE to be much less competitive by not spending taking normal opportunities to improve the 2020 team. He chose a much different approach. He chose to accept a poorer team, and push $20M into 2021. I understand that many supported this approach, and in fact would have pushed even more by getting rid of a veteran ort two.
Which is it. Did he choose to not compete as you said or are we splitting hairs?
He did everything he normally does. Show me a player in Gilmore’s situation that he extended 3 years in a row to make the dead money 3 times the salary in the final year. You can’t because he has never come close to doing that.
Show me all these great players that were traded that he missed out on. Show me more than 1 game changing in season traded every 5-10 years to prove he “normally” does that.
ZERO trades guarantee positive results, never mind four guaranteed wins. Do YOU think that using the cap money wouldn 't have helped the team and make it more competitive and more likely to be in the playoffs?
So show me all these traded players he missed on. Or was he supposed to kidnap them?
No. The position this team was in left it no cap money at the time it was needed. Making stupid moves to say you made moves doesn’t magically put you in the playoffs with 4 additional wins.
Your argument seems to be that the difference between Tom Brady and Cam Newton is a couple if minor signings in addition to losing Hightower, cannon, Chung, van noy, Collins, Harmon, karras et al.
There was not enough cap room or resources to keep the team equal to last year even if Brady was still here. You are in a dream world if you think adding a couple of mid level players to this team after free agency was over would make them better after all those defections with cam Newton than they were with Tom Brady, not to mention the tougher schedule.
