A little bit of perspective to discuss.

[TommyD4207]

The amount of words and mental energy expended on this guy who's absolute ceiling is 'JAG', and in production terms to this point in his career is 'Sucks' is unbelievable.

 

[PATSNUTme]

Do I believe the stat's from PFF or my lying eyes?
Lowe is awful. I take no joy saying that. If he's on the roster when the season starts, I'll be disappointed.

 

[BTTA]

There's probably some upside to his future performance that we can't see, because of the coaching upgrade and having Moses around. But is that 3% or 30%? No idea.

 

[DarrylS]

We can only hope that with the addition of Campbell and Wilson, and a new optimistic feeling with the team direction, maybe Scar can’t resist dragging himself out of retirement and lending a hand.

We can all dream about Scar, but pretty sure he has said his good bye to the coaching grind. He is now 77 and although he is probably fit as a fiddle, at best we can hope he might just stop by once and a while and his coaching props will rub off on the current staff & players.

 

[Zuma]

Not exactly the same but Hogan got a lot of crap for not being able to step up and produce like a WR1 when we had injuries. He was not meant to be WR1 but many people didn’t care. Lowe is a good backup LT. Every team has the same talent at backup LT…or worse.

 

[Huckleberry1]

Lowe will impress at TC this summer. He’s got a great character. No doubt working his butt off.

His wingspan is at 100%.
Will Campbell’s is at 0%.

Can Lowe overcome his lack of athleticism with better coaching—finally GOOD coaching—grit, and experience?

Campbell is top 1% athletically of all tackles to come out of college since 1986, Lowe is a HORRIBLE athlete. Just having long arms means absolutely nothing, the truth is that he sucks. He belongs somewhere coaching high school football. The “ wingspan” argument is the dumbest ****ing thing I have ever heard in my life. The only thing his “ wingspan” is good for is trying to grab the guys who run past him because he’s such a horrible athlete.

 

[Huckleberry1]

The amount of words and mental energy expended on this guy who's absolute ceiling is 'JAG', and in production terms to this point in his career is 'Sucks' is unbelievable.

BINGO! Lowe is a horrible LT, I’m really hoping he’s gone at the end of the summer. I never want to see him playing in front of Maye again.

 

[JohnJH]

Lowe was a passable Pass Blocking LT and a terrible Run Blocking left tackle. Jacobs and Robinson were terrible pass blocking and run blocking though Robinson showed some plays that were impressive he clearly wasn't ready to start last year, and we shall see if he shows more this year. Lowes below average play would not have been so detrimental if it wasn't for other parts of the line being so atrocious.

You could get by with Lowe in an emergency start or 2, and he showed vast improvement and might improve more with better coaching. I don't see how he becomes a starting LT for an NFL team with the poor run blocking but as a backup LT you could do worse.

I'm not sure you want to count on Marcus Bryant to backup LT but if he impresses, then Lowe could be cut. Lowe probably sticks, especially if they think he can play RT also as a backup.

I hope that both Bryant AND Conley knock it out of the park in camp and the pre-season. Bryant could be our long-term answer at RT (and a ST/Backup LT in the meantime). Conley has position flexibility. I also like his size.

 

[Wozzy]

Lowe sucks… perspective.

 

[lancerman]

Lowe was awful. If there are stats that show otherwise, it shows a flaw in the application of the stats, not a flaw in the consensus perception of Lowe.

 

[TommyD4207]

I honestly don't remember, was Lowe a draft binky or something?
Is this just a case of some people refusing to admit they were wrong?

 

[PancakeBlockPaul]

@patfanken, you are spot on good sir! I also think he’s a decent backup. Pretty sure all the negativity directed at him is due to him being an easy target and us pats fans still expecting to have the best of the best at everything….Them playing musical chairs with the OL set them up to fail. I think they said there were what, 15, 16 different combinations of the OL last year which gives no time to gel. I get that injuries happen, but they were moving people around from day 1. I’ve got the feeling that we won’t be doing that this year outside of any injuries….

 

[JoeSixPat]

I happened to see this on my browser that pops up various news and sport stories by a number of outlets from the Huffingtion post, AP and Fox. I happened to come across this one that was titled "Patriots vet might just be doing his last UTA's with the team" or something like that. I thought it meant some vet was going to get cut and I wanted to find out who. But when I opened the article, it was basically saying that this might be the last season for VLowe because of number of young OT's on the roster who could be ready in 26.

You are right, nothing but speculative filler like those proposed trade deals that are always there in every sport. The writer gave a "keen sense of the obvious" thought process which initially made me wish I hadn't bothered to open it. However, it DID provide one little nugget that caused me to go HMMMM.

He gave some of his PFF stats and I again made me wonder what an OLman has to do to gain any respect. Now I saw this a couple of days ago, so my numbers might be off a few either way, but the point remains. Remember this is the guy who was universally despised and reviled here and in the press for doing a horrible job, creating a need that was SO great, that we probably overdrafted a guy just a bit to fill the "gaping" need.

Basically the line was that in 1,038 (or so) snaps Lowe allowed 58 hurries, 11 sacks and 13 penalties. All on the negative end of the list of other OT's So it is easy to see why people would be naturally negative about the player regardless of the coaching situation last season.
HOWEVER just think about it for a second. He allowed a hurry LESS than 6% of the snaps. Sacks at 1% and penalties 1.3%.

Edit: I of curiosity I checked the PFF site and looked up VLowe and came away with different numbers but the same conclusions. They had 803saps, 502 where passing downs, with 5 sacks, 33 hurries and 5 hits. That means he allowed pressures on 6.6% of passing downs, and allowed a sack 1% of the time. His pass blocking #s where average (17th in the league), his run blocking # were poor. And he got a penalty just 3% of the time.

Bottom line, regardless of which numbers you use, VLowe was doing the job pass blocking a VAST majority of the time going against the best rushers, all who are being paid massive amounts of $ for essentially FAILING a vast majority of the time. Think about that for a second and gain some perspective.

Count me among the VLowe fans... I mean, he's the LT if Campbell gets injured or, as one of the smaller LTs in recent memory, can't adeuqately perform, yes?

Don't get me wrong - I like what I've seen from Campbell so far, but he wouldn't be the first college LT who wound up being a better fit at LG... I just think we're better off keeping our expectations reasonable, with the worst case scenario being that the OL is better than last year, but needing another offseason to really be contender quality.



Despite the early roster predictions, my guess and hope is that we'll see Vrabel leave some room for some veteran OL pickups as rosters get cut down.

We've seen far too many teams struggle with a good QB and bad OL for too long, and it's not as simple a fix as drafting the Top LT in the draft, who has yet to play a pro snap.

I like the notion of a record crop of rookies, but I also think Vrabel realizes that you can never have enough depth at OL and in particular, backup plans for LT... so I'm in the camp of keeping VLowe and brining in other veteran linemen, even if its just to have stock for the "shadow rosters" the Patriots have turned to in years past!

 

[ctpatsfan77]

There are more bait title sports stories now than ever. I come across them every day. I'm now at the point where i ignore every bait title... unless it says a specific name is cut i ignore it and don't click. If it was important it would give more than vague info.

A few general rules I have for deciding if an article is worth my time:

#1 red flag: the headline mentions a dollar value for no good reason.
#2: the headline contains "predicted" or "urged" or some other verb indicating "here's what someone else thinks should happen"
#3: the story is clearly talking about a player, but the player isn't named in the headline

As an example of crap versus decent read:

 

[Wozzy]

Count me among the VLowe fans... I mean, he's the LT if Campbell gets injured or, as one of the smaller LTs in recent memory, can't adeuqately perform, yes?

Not necessarily, Lowe might not even make the 53 man roster.

Sidy Sow, Marcus Bryant, moving Moses to the left side, heck even Jacobs or Wallace might be better options.

Don't get me wrong - I like what I've seen from Campbell so far, but he wouldn't be the first college LT who wound up being a better fit at LG... I just think we're better off keeping our expectations reasonable, with the worst case scenario being that the OL is better than last year, but needing another offseason to really be contender quality.

Or they could be pretty good with the starters we saw in OTA’s, we’ll see. But we have a large sample size of Lowe now.

 

[Huckleberry1]

I honestly don't remember, was Lowe a draft binky or something?
Is this just a case of some people refusing to admit they were wrong?

In State’s case he hates Will Campbell and has tried to say that Lowe will be their starting left tackle this year. He also has a Spencer Rattler fetish, wanted them to pass on Maye, and recently said Rattler will have a better season than Maye this year, which will be tough to do while riding the Saints bench.

 

[Huckleberry1]

@patfanken, you are spot on good sir! I also think he’s a decent backup. Pretty sure all the negativity directed at him is due to him being an easy target and us pats fans still expecting to have the best of the best at everything….Them playing musical chairs with the OL set them up to fail. I think they said there were what, 15, 16 different combinations of the OL last year which gives no time to gel. I get that injuries happen, but they were moving people around from day 1. I’ve got the feeling that we won’t be doing that this year outside of any injuries….

For some reason people seem to keep leaving out that he’s one of the worst athletes in the league. Last I knew being a terrible athlete makes it very difficult to be a good professional athlete, no matter “ how long your arms are.”

 

[TommyD4207]

In State’s case he hates Will Campbell and has tried to say that Lowe will be their starting left tackle this year. He also has a Spencer Rattler fetish, wanted them to pass on Maye, and recently said Rattler will have a better season than Maye this year, which will be tough to do while riding the Saints bench.

Spencer Rattler may not finish out his rookie contract.
Thank you for the perspective on the source, here, genuinely.

Edit: I still need to see Campbell actually do it on the field, and I have my questions about him, but Will Campbell with no ****ing arms is better than Verdarian Lowe on his best day.

 

[WhatJustHappened]

We'll see, don't bash him the 1st time he makes a mistake because it suits ***gots that want to see him fail.
People that don't care about the team, but want to be right, will be all over that .
It'll happen, it happens to EVERY LT every year... people think they are perfect... lmfao

 

[XLIX]

We can only hope that with the addition of Campbell and Wilson, and a new optimistic feeling with the team direction, maybe Scar can’t resist dragging himself out of retirement and lending a hand.

I could see him paying a one day visit to see old friends but the man is not coming out of retirement.