captain stone
PatsFans.com Retired Jersey Club
- Joined
- Sep 29, 2004
- Messages
- 34,425
- Reaction score
- 27,758
One comment from Patriots owner Robert Kraft flew under the radar this week, but really shouldn’t have. Here it is: “In the end, if you want to have a good, consistent, winning football team, you can’t do it in free agency. You have to do it through the draft. I don’t feel we’ve done the greatest job the last few years and I really hope, and I believe, I’ve seen a different approach this year.” That Kraft wants better draft results, when you look at how the Patriots have done of late, isn’t a surprise. But a different approach? What does that mean? Well, in the past, Bill Belichick’s had a very closed-off process and, in his defense, for the most part it’s worked. But it’s also led to personnel people feeling like they were actively cut out where other teams’ people weren’t. In essence, the Patriots’ scouts would do their jobs through the season and then hand off the process to Belichick and the coaches in February, with only a couple guys on the personnel side really consistently involved from that point forward. Where most teams had draft meetings with their scouts in February and April, the Patriots would have theirs with scouts in December and February. And at that early point, it’s tough to set the board, with two and a half months of information still to come. So from there on, the scouts would just be gatherers, which frustrated plenty of them, and played into the exodus in the scouting department the last few years. It also, as some saw it, led to misses like N’Keal Harry in 2019. Harry killed his 30 visit that spring and had a college coach, Todd Graham, who was close to Belichick. In that end, without more input from scouts who preferred Deebo Samuel and A.J. Brown, the coach wound up leaning on his own experience with Harry, rather than the red flags his scouts planted, and lost a golden opportunity to fill a hole on his roster. And that brings us back to what Kraft said: The Patriots have employed a “different approach” this year. My sense right now is that has translated inside the building in a more collaborative Belichick, who’s listening not just to his top guys, Dave Ziegler and Eliot Wolf, but also those rising through the organization, like national scout Matt Groh. Now, I don’t know if it’ll change the Patriots’ luck on draft day. Or if Belichick will pull back on it when we get there. But for now, it feels like a good positive step for them.
It was even worse than I thought in there...At least ownership has finally admitted publicly that there have been Way Too Many misses - including during the draft's first two days - than should be acceptable, especially when considering the reputation of the man making the Final Decisions...