The main reason I say this is because Brady’s not getting any younger and there’s a good chance he’s going to lose another prime career year to a 2011 lockout. Thus we need the team to be as good as possible this year.

I’m just worried Kraft is going to allow the team to get hurt because it’ll look bad for him to be both handing out huge contracts and being in the owners’ leadership group saying that costs have to be kept under control.

On the other hand, isn’t it just wild that in only six years we’ve gone from being the (seemingly) hopeless outclassed underdog to the Evil Empire? (Fear the Hoodie! . These truly are the best of times for Pats fans.

Man…this is going to be a loooooong week.

I’m not sure what to think about this. Moss’s history shows him to be the antithesis of the so-called “Patriots’ player”. He gets in trouble off the field and worse from a football point of view, dogs it on the field. When he has a decoy route he doesn’t run it out. He complains about not getting the ball all the time. And so on.

On the other hand, he apparently really wanted to come to New England. He forced the trade by refusing to restructure his contract for the Raiders or the Packers. I have to believe he’s going to be making a lot less here than he’d have gotten if he stayed in Oakland. I have to believe Belichick laid it on the line to him up front that Brady throws to whoever is open, that BB doesn’t tolerate players dogging it, and that if Moss starts up his primadonna act he’ll be on the street. So maybe Moss really is motivated and will actually play hard?

If — a big if — Moss does play hard, he’s definitely worth a 4th round pick. And looking at it another way — even with a terrible QB and the league’s worst offense by far last year, Moss had better numbers than most Patriots’ receivers. So maybe he will have a big year?

So what receivers will be on the outside looking in as the season starts? Assuming he doesn’t screw up, Moss will be on the roster. So will Welker and Stallworth. And if the knee really does recover, you have to think they’ll have Chad Jackson on the roster as well. What then of Caldwell, Gaffney, Washington, and Troy Brown? I don’t think it’s looking good for Troy, even if he does recover from his knee injury.

The Bledsoe years here were bittersweet. He was tall. He had an arm. But he didn’t want to put in the year-round time improving his game, he couldn’t do progressions, and had terrible pocket feel. It’s too bad for him he didn’t come out of college in the 1970s. Behind the kind of offensive line you could put together in those pre-free agency days, and with some wideout burners, he may well have been known as the greatest QB of all time. Unfortunately for him, he came into the NFL in the 1990s and would not or could not adapt to what defenses did to him once Belichick had a shot at him.

And lets not hear about how he was amazing in the 2001 AFC title game in Pittsburgh. Brady had led the Pats most of the way down the field before one of Cowher’s thugs cheap-shotted him. Bledsoe then made a couple of good plays to finish the drive. After that, with the exception of one crucial 3rd down completion, that was a hide-your-head-behind-your-hands-and-pray-nothing-bad-happens game. Don’t forget the ball Bledsoe threw backwards over his head while facing away from the defense. Still, it was nice to see him get one last moment in the spotlight.

And then, after those first 8 games in Buffalo, it all turned to ashes. Pats fans would nod in quasi-sympathy as Buffalo and then Dallas fans would complain about all the faults Pats fans knew too well. Can anyone forget the patented Bledsoe backpedal toward the sideline and throw the game-losing INT?

But he was tall. And strong. And had a rocket arm…

But no! A RB and a WR. However, when you think about it, you can’t complain too much about taking people at those positions. Dillon is 32. Falk is 30. Pass is pushing 30. They have to start getting younger there. As for the flankers, there’s Branch, Caldwell, Troy Brown, and Bethel Johnson. Troy has been great for this team, but he’s on his last legs. Bethel is a failed experiment. It appears the only thing he knows how to do is run a flag, post, or go. If it doesn’t involve running mostly straight down the field, he can’t do it. And that’s even before we get into his numerous healthy scratches for having bad practices or for disciplinary reasons. Especially if the Pats can pick up one more decent WR, I can’t see Bethel on the team this year.

Is this it for Pass, too? Will the Patriots really keep four RBs? Then again, maybe they’ll cut Klecko (especially if they don’t think he can do it at LB) and use Pass as a fullback instead of playing games with Klecko, Seymour (don’t EVER do that again) and various OLmen.

Do you like Bill Belichick?

“I don’t care who it is or what’s going on, I think, just to be real honest, I don’t care if we’re brothers, sometimes you fight but at the end of the day you still love each other. I don’t love Coach Belichick like I love my kids and my wife, but at the same time I think there’s definitely a level of respect I have for him, when you look at his track record, he’s the winningest coach in the last four years. That speaks for itself. Myself, I’m like a sponge and I know he has a lot of knowledge and wisdom on a lot of issues as far as football is concerned that can help me out. He’s coached a lot of great players. He’s always pushed me to go to higher levels and that’s something that I definitely respect and would like to grow with as well.”

Mind you, I don’t really care that Seymour doesn’t “like” BB — that he respects him and will execute his game plans is good enough. But I do admit that I’d love to know what the players think of him. My guess is that they don’t really like him much at all (let’s be honest — between Holley’s book, Halberstam’s book, and the evidence we’ve seen, BB is probably not the most fun guy to be around), but like Seymour, they like that he can put them in position to win.

UPDATE:
Apparently Reiss’s transcript left out the opening three words: “Why wouldn’t I?” Unlike some commenters, I don’t think that changes the meaning of the rest of Seymour’s answer.

I really hope that didn’t happen.

Those of you who have been fans since 2001 and here nothing but glowing praise of Kraft (unless you make the mistake of reading Wrong Borges and Nick Cafardo) might not realize that fandom had many doubts about Kraft all through the 1990s. When he bought the team he seemed a lot like a Mini-Me to Jerry Jones’s Dr. Evil. Kraft was seen with a stopwatch timing players at camp, he was constantly glad-handing fans around the stadium on game days and looked like he might turn into a meddler, a la Jones or Steinbrenner. Then there was l’affaire Parcells and the long decay of the Carroll years, where it was clear that any player with a grudge or a whine could jump the chain of command and go to Kraft. Not good.

And now we have these reports. On one hand it could be nothing. No matter how much you like Troy Brown, you have to concede he’s a player at the end of the line. So this isn’t like the owner’s intervention determining the future of the team. On the other hand, if players begin to feel that they can evade Belichick and Pioli and get things into Kraft’s hands, that’s a very bad precedent given the system that Belichick and Pioli have put in place. If Kraft makes a lie of Belichick’s pledges to his players that everyone gets treated the same, it could get nasty, especially when the inevitable stinker season comes along.

So lets all hope those reports are wrong.

Then we were saved by the Arrival of Bill and the concomitant act of Kraft essentially agreeing to butt out of football operations. And as far as we can tell, he’s stuck to it, even as fan favorites and his own favorite player (Bledsoe) were released or traded.

Then you’ll have to pardon me for saying that I hope he shanks every FG he attempts this year, and I want him to get his bell rung when Indianapolis plays in Foxboro in the upcoming season. And I’ll be out there booing every time he steps onto the field.

Yes, I’m thankful for the kicks he’s made over the years. And if Bill “Intercepting Manning should be against the rules” Polian wants to overpay for him, you can’t really blame him for going. But he chose to join the enemy — he’s a member of the enemy now and that’s how I’m treating him. And I think he has to knock Curtis Martin off the top of the Traitor’s List.

While it is true that there’s no way the Pats should have matched the poison pill deal that the Jet offerted to Martin, the Pats shouldn’t have let it get to that. Martin was clearly a tremendous bargain and the team should have re-negotiated his contract (or at least attempted to) instead of letting him get to free agency. “How is that different than Vinatieri?”, you may say. For starters, Vinatieri has been the top-paid kicker the league and the offer from the Pats that he rejected would have kept him there. So this isn’t the case of a team refusing to up the salary of the player who is worth far, far more than his contract.

To be fair to Vinatieri, he did take the high road and said all the right things at his Indy press conference — refusing to take whacks at the Patriots even though it has been widely reported (even before free agency began) that he wanted out of New England and had been incensed over his pay, over how negotiations have been handled both this year and in the past, and over the use/non-use of the franchise tag on him.

So, I’m sorry. I’ll thank you for what you did here, but I am not wishing you good luck going forward. Good health? Sure. But after that, I hope you have horrible seasons to come. You could have gone to a different team, but you went to the Colts. You’re dead to me now.

I can’t stand Cowher. I want to see him always fail. My ideal Superbowl would be for Pittsburgh to jump out to a big lead and then choke it away due to the usual Cowher stupidity.

Pittsburgh is dirty. Intentionally taking out Palmer (don’t give me that “the DLman was blocked into Palmer” garbage. That’s total BS as even a quick glance at the replay will show you. The DLman reached out with his arm, wrapped it around Palmer’s leg, and pushed his shoulder into Palmer’s knee). Dirty, dirty, dirty. And this isn’t the first time the Cowher’s cowards have tried to win a playoff game by taking out the opponent’s QB. Queue up the tape of the AFC championship four years ago. Lee Flowers twice rolled into Brady’s legs untouched and very late, succeeding in knocking Brady out of the game the second time. Cowher and his team are dirty and deserve to lose.

Pittsburgh has that idiot loudmouth Joey Porter.

Two Seattle players (Matt Hasselbeck and Lofa Tatupu) are sons of former Patriots.

Given all that, how could any Pats fan root for Pittsburgh??

Up front, who was out against Kansas City? No one. Not a single significant player. They were all there. And don’t give me Ted Johnson. Again, lets be realistic. Johnson was a good, solid player and much admired. But missing him is not the answer to what is wrong with the Patriots defense. If anything, its allowed Roosevelt Colvin to get on the field more and Colvin has been one of the few defensive players who has been mostly good this year. The answer isn’t Johnson.

So is it Harrison? Surely in part. But its not the difference between a Super Bowl defense and the worst Patriots defense in their history, at least since I have been watching (30 years or so). It just can’t be. Its impossible. And there were signs things were wrong before Harrison went out. Think of the first drive of the year versus Oakland. Think of the long pass to Moss. Think of the long pass to Proehl against Carolina. Think of the eighty something yarder versus Pittsburgh before Harrison got hurt. Just those three passes alone would be out of character for an entire season of the past few Patriots defenses. Yet those three alone happened in the nine quarters Harrison WAS on the field early in the year. Something was wrong even then.

So what is it? To some degree, its everything. Its Harrison. It is Gay and Johnson and other injuries a little bit (but only to a limited extent as discussed above). Its the strong opponents. Its the lack of confidence. Its the injuries and non-production on offense. Probably a hundred other things as well.

But for all those things, its also the coaching. Eric Mangini simply has not done a good job this year. There is no other way to spin it. I doubt he feels he has. He can’t. The results are simply not there where anyone could be satisfied. Yes he has somewhat been a victim of the injuries and every other thing that has gone wrong this year, but he hasn’t found a way to figure it out or even to show much improvement or stability as the season has gone on.

(via)

I think this is an excellent point and is why I think the Pats are doomed to be one-and-done when the playoffs start.

I’m losing faith that the team can get it together to do anything meaningful in the playoffs. As I said below, I’m coming around to believe there’s a problem beyond just the injuries (remember the “malaise” that Brady and Troy Brown referred to a couple of weeks ago).

But with the Pats losing today and Denver and SD squeaking by their opponents, and Cincinnati also winning, the Pats are pretty much stuck with the #4 seed (let alone having any chance left of the bye). So with respect to NE’s playoff chances, the Monday nighter is pretty much irrelevant. So that means rooting for Indy to lose, lose, lose!

I’m starting to come around to Felger’s view that we can’t keep blaming the injuries. Sure, losing Rodney was big in the secondary. But in the front seven the only people gone from last year are Ted Johnson and Keith Traylor. So I don’t buy injuries as a complete excuse for the execrable pass rush and the bad run defense.