203Pat
Pro Bowl Player
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2014
- Messages
- 10,409
- Reaction score
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You and your ilk like to tell people how to think and how they should root for the team. Please return to your echo chamber.Nobody crapped on your head. You grossly overreacted and now are blaming others for your emotions.
So we shouldn't complain about trading back to take a mediocre player because your lord and savior, Bill Belichick, took said mediocre player?I could turn that around to say that anyone who bitterly complains about the drafting of Cole Strange must be a major Bill hater.
We had the 21st pick. We traded down to 29 for a 3rd and a 4th, which all by itself was a good move. At 29 we picked Strange, who is a starting guard and will be for the remainder of his time here. When you land a starting G at 29, that's a good result, especially for an athlete like Strange whose RAS was like top 10 out of the past 500 OL drafted, and who our staff spent a solid week with at the Senior Bowl. There's very few guards that move like Strange, he's a quality player.
The ancient history about Thuney and Mason is just that. Thuney priced himself out of town at $14+m per year, which in today's dollars and cap would be at least $18-19m. Good bye Joe, no problem with that move. Both he and Mason were good players, but we got comp + cap relief so imo we did fine navigating through all that.
Strange may have hit the bench a couple of times in his rookie year, but last year he was battling an injury from training camp on, so you can attribute any bench time to that. And also not to mention that his rookie year was the disaster of Patricia, and last year was just as bad with the OL coach checking out of town.
Staring guards over the last few years:
Sidy Sow, 4th round
Mike Onwenu, 6th round
Joe Thuney, 3rd round
Ted Karras, 6th round
Shaq Mason, 4th round
So if we landed starting guards in the mid to late rounds, all of which who are/were better or equivalent to Cole Strange, then tell me why it is so good to land a starting guard at 29? Guard isn't a blue chip position. You can find quality guards in the middle part of the draft which is where we generally draft our starting guards outside of two guys in almost 25 years. This whole "He's a good player" thing is the same thing that happened with Sony Michel. We picked an average player in the first round but half the board wants to claim it was a good pick because he started games. Strange is average at best and for a first round pick at a position like guard he should be much better than average.
Not sure how Thuney and Mason are "ancient history" when the way the end of their time here was handled is the reason Bill drafted Strange. I get not wanting to pay a guard big money especially when they already paid Mason on a pretty big deal. What I don't get is the incredibly stupid decision to franchise Thuney in a lost year to cost ourselves a third round comp pick due to Bill's spending spree in free agency the next year. If Bill let Thuney walk after 2019 we get a third round comp pick and save $14 million dollars. So no, we didn't get any real compensation outside of the 5th rounder we got back for Mason. Throw in trading away Mason and then making an offer to Karras only to lower that offer when Cincy offered more than Bill's original offer to Karras and there is a complete bungling of the guard spot that directly ties to Strange.
Okay. I guess we get to make excuses for why our first round guard got benched multiple times in his rookie year. I love that one of your excuses is Bill compounding his mistakes. Taking an average player to fill a hole he created through his own roster mismanagement only to have that player coached by bad coaches he hired. So when Strange sucks this year is it because he hurt his knee and missed time over the summer or is it just because a previously average player suffered a major injury and now is even worse than average? Or will it just be more unfortunate luck for Mr. Strange?