Patriots Meriweather Confused About The Doubters

[BradyFTW!]

There is kind of a dubious argument that your past draft picks being cut means you are a bad drafter when your new acquisitions, including draft picks beat them out.
Tate was a 3rd round pick, beaten out by another 3rd round pick (Price).
Because this is a well managed organization we have the opportunity to have Welker, 85 and Branch ahead of those guys (because we can afford them) so that our 2 3rd round picks need to fight for a job.
The point of building a team isnt to draft players and plug them in based on where you drafted and hope, its to continually attempt to raise the level of talent on your team. Getting better players to beat out the ones you have is not a failure of having drafted the guy in the first place.

We draft more players than anyone. We keep more than anyone, and we get rid of more than anyone. (Or close to it) The ones that fail are displaced by the ones that don't.

In theory, you should be able to at least sort of separate the drafting acumen from the difficulty in making the roster by seeing how a guy like Tate does with his next team. In practice, I don't think we'll ever know, since I think the knee injury must have taken away a lot of his athleticism. Hard to blame the FO for drafting a guy whose strength was his athleticism, who then proceeded to get injured. Belichick can do a lot of things, but he can't see into the future.