Failing to admit that Maroney and Meriweather were poor draft choices just makes you seem unobjective and biased -- and "stupid" as well. First round picks are supposed to become full time starters and hopefully develop into some of the better players on your roster. Almost every Patriots fans, even the ones on the "take" like Mike Reiss, admit that 2006-2008 set this team back due to poor drafts.
Just because Maroney and Meriweather "gave us 3 years" doesn't mean anything if those years were not good. Ron Brace has also given us three years -- three years of nothing.
Maroney never turned into the Corey Dillion replacement that he was supposed to be. He could never stay healthy and even when he was healthy, he wasn't nearly consistent or good enough. A first round pick at RB is supposed to be your bell-cow back -- he's not supposed to challenged and beaten out by the likes of old guys on their last legs (Fred Taylor and Sammy Morris) or UDFA's (BJGE and Woodhead). The fact that Maroney, a first round pick, could not out-perform the likes of Taylor, Morris, Faulk, and BJGE just shows how bad of a pick he was. He was inactive for the season opener, so he was behind all of those guys on the depth chart.
Just because Meriweather was a starter for most of the year in both 09 and 10, doesn't mean he was a good pick. He never lived up to his draft status and was a large part of the blow coverages/porous play at times by the secondary in 2009 and 2010. He never developed into the playmaking safety that we needed as Rodney's career was winding down. He was more a part of the problem than the solution. I don't know how you can deny that -- he was benched in both 2009 and 2010 at different points in time in favor of guys like James Sanders and McGowan. Even after James Sanders was cut this summer, Meriweather could not even beat out Josh Barrett, Serigo Brown, and James Ihedigbo for a roster spot.
You can slice every draft pick anyway you want it and find some sort of excuse for why the player didn't pan out. You can say that Wheatley's injury ruined his career, but he had injury problems at Colorado. So maybe your beloved Pats didn't put enough stock in him being injury prone in college. You can blame injuries for the bust of Shawn Crable, but one of the big knocks on him coming out of school was that he didn't have an NFL body that could hold up -- too skinny, not a big enough trunk/base, can't hold up in the NFL.
But the bottom line is that, whatever reason you want to claim that a guy failed, 2006-2008 were poor drafts and 2009 was okay but not as good as we originally thought it might be. This thread is assessing BB's drafting, not the trades he made to get Welker and Moss. It's funny how Moss and Welker are always included in the 2007 draft, but when the Jets trade picks for Cromartie, Jenkins, or Holmes and get good seasons out of them, it's not included because they were too "short term" or they "refuse to build through the draft the right way like the Pats."
There is no doubt that these drafts set this team back. If Terrence Wheatley turns into a starting CB, maybe Bill doesn't have to spend another pick at CB on Butler and another on McCourty. Maybe he can go after a DE or an OLB and strengthen the front 7. If Bill takes David Harris or Jon Beason instead of Meriweather, maybe your linebacking corps doesn't have Gary Guyton playing major snaps for 2+ years.
Failing to admit that the 06-08 drafts were downright pitiful is failing to deal with reality.
I think the main problem is that there's no real context to the situations outlined above. Sure, we can all point out examples of Player X (Mike Wallace) being better than Player Y drafted before him (Brandon Tate), but does that make Team A (Pittsburgh) smarter than Team B (New England)?
Well we definitely whiffed on Tate. But Pittsburgh also whiffed with their 3rd-round pick, selecting Kraig Urbik 5 picks ahead of Wallace. If Pittsburgh really knew how good Wallace would be, would they risk drafting Urbik ahead of him? Of course not. But in hindsight in a vacuum, these types of statements are always made, and it doesn't really prove much of anything.
So with the understanding that any analysis of the draft will be flawed, that anyone can (and will) nit-pick at minute details while ignoring the larger picture, I've taken a look at the 2006 to 2008 drafts for several of the top franchises in the league. It's certainly not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and we can argue points all over it, but the basic points still hold pretty true. New England has definitely done poorly. But it's not by as wide a margin as you think.
All numbers were taken from
NFL Draft History and AFL Drafts - Pro-Football-Reference.com.
While we know a lot of picks were traded in 2007, it's still surprising to find the Pats with the second-fewest picks in this comparison of top teams. What's also interesting is the average draft value of those picks (using the draft value chart as a basis).
The total starters are pretty low. We could argue back and forth on that number, especially as the stats are a bit weird here (Maroney was never a starter according to Pro Football Reference), but the basic point holds true that we didn't find enough quality guys to start.
Oddly enough, the common draft complaint of constantly trading down is that we take quantity vs. quality, yet the Pats lead the way with All Pro and Pro Bowl players.
Yes, some will say Meriweather's Pro Bowls shouldn't count and that he was a bust as a 1st rounder, but that's stupid. A guy who starts multiple seasons and gets to multiple Pro Bowls is not a bust. A 1st round bust is someone like Justin Harrell (2007 Packers).
Yes, even other top teams make mistakes at the top of the draft. For every Patsfans complaint about Shawn Crable, there's an equivalent Tony Ugoh (Colts 2nd round) or David Pittman (Ravens 3rd round) or Bruce Davis (Steelers 3rd round).
But in terms of total contributors, it's not really that far off. Yes, we're at the bottom of this chart, but these are pretty small sample sizes. For context, if one other player had become a contributor for the Pats, we would be in 4th place among the top 6 teams, just behind Green Bay and just ahead of the Eagles, hardly way behind the rest of the league.
Of course the most important thing here is wins. 39 wins for the Patriots lead the way during this period. The Colts finish with 37. Pittsburgh is 3rd with 30. These are probably the best franchises in the league, so to be within their range during the worst 3-year stretch of the BB era speaks volumes about how good we've had it.
