Kraft personally promised that Welker's long-term contract would be taken care of before last year's season. Instead, the team chose to extend Hernandez and Gronkowski. The general feeling among many, many folks at the time was that the lack of any meaningful negotiations and the slapping of a franchise tag on Welker meant that he would be playing his last season. The feeling was that Belichick chose among his three assets. Obviously, we were all correct.
Don't folks even remember the beginning of the season when the controversy was whether Welker would be less a part of the offense? Some would say that sanity prevailed. NOT. Injury intervened.
The team through for more than 20 yards as few times as almost any team in the nil. One suspects that will now change. When we run a 2TE 2WR formation, I presume that we will have two TRUE outside wide receivers. The TE's are quite able to cover the slot. To put it another way, we have invested a lot in TE's to cover the slot. I would hope that we consider this issue when we consider backups to the TE's and when we consider our backup receivers.