Fired Mid-Season:
- Josh McDaniels (LV Raiders)
- Frank Reich (CAR Panthers)
- Brandon Staley (LA Chargers)
Fired Post-Season:
- Arthur Smith (ATL Falcons)
- Ron Rivera (WAS Commanders)
- Mike Vrabel (TEN Titans) [Thanks Nusm@lemmy.zip]
- Pete Carroll (SEA Seahawks)
- Bill Belichick (NE Patriots)
Add any new firings or anything I missed and I’ll add them.
He has been rebuilding. It takes time and discipline. Every other team, with far lower highs, has bigger dips than the Patriots have had so far on this downswing. The league is built to actively punish success and the team had been borrowing from the future (at a sustainable, not reckless pace) for two decades. You don’t rebuild by spending through the roof. You rebuild by cleaning your books, establishing a base (which he has, by focusing on a young, deep defense that stayed very good despite their two best players hitting IR early in the season), and don’t start borrowing again until it puts you over the hump.
You can’t sustain borrowing. Bill did it longer than anyone else by a large margin, by keeping the numbers manageable, but it’s why Brady ended to begin with. Two decades of your players costing more, your draft picks being lower, and continued cost of paying back borrowing added up until building a team could no longer be done. Nobody rebuilds overnight. There are teams that are perceived to do so, but those teams that cleaned house and became “instant contenders” have a several years of top 10 picks for the new guy to build around.
As for Mac, it’s entirely possible he’s not the guy. But he didn’t start to break down until repeatedly getting shredded on three step drops. The first several games of the season, he was playing great football, consistently making the right reads and putting the ball in the right place at the right time on any play he had blocking long enough to complete his drop. Game ending drives weren’t ended by Mac making bad decisions or throws. They were ended by a churning, heavily injured receiving room not bringing down his throws. Eventually, after half a season of that and getting killed on short drops before guys could win short routes, he started to press and make more desperate, dangerous plays. It’s possible we broke him. But unless you absolutely love the guy at 3, quarterback isn’t the priority. You can’t develop a QB behind that line. You invest premium assets at line so you can protect someone. Building a team isn’t overnight. If you draft a QB without protecting him, you’re just going to break that guy too.
I wish you were right that we just have to stink for a few years to somehow justify everything, but that’s not how the league works. It’s not even how the Patriots have historically worked. We’re literally the second lowest spend in the league (https://www.spotrac.com/nfl/cash/). Belichick made this a sticking point, leading to Kraft emphasizing it wasn’t even from him (https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/robert-kraft-responds-to-bill-belichicks-comments-on-patriots-money-spending-that-will-never-be-the-issue/). We have the draft picks. We’re not the Rams, having traded every pick we possibly could’ve. We just used them to get Cole Strange in the first round in 2022, leading to McVay to laugh at the choice since Strange would’ve been available for at least another round without risk. 2023 was notably better but still emphasized defensive side of the ball. If it’s not money or picks, what do you mean when you say “borrowing from the future”? I don’t mean to sound like a prick but it sounds hand-wavy and doesn’t really point to any deficiency.
I agree that we need to have a foundation on the team but we need to have that on both sides of the ball. We’ve got a great defense but no offensive standouts. An O-Line repeatedly swapped around leading to no cohesion. No WR1. Not even really a WR2. Unloaded Jakobi Meyers for Juju at the same rate thinking we’d get an improvement in yards after the catch but didn’t. We don’t even have players on offense that can “do their job” any longer. Players were running into each other during routes or clearly trying to recover a bad route in the Cowboys game. We’ve had the resources to rebuild, we just haven’t used them.
And Mac is just not gonna be that guy. He has some bright spots but lost the locker room with his O-line refusing to help him back to his feet (which literally every O-line does when their QB is hit) and just repeatedly breaking down his fundamentals every time he played this year. Tossing across the field multiple times in a game is unhinged and really playing with fire. I really do think you’d enjoy those QB School videos on YouTube. They have a lot of great details about the play calling, qb fundamentals, etc.
Cash spending is never, under any circumstance a meaningful metric. “Cash spending” is low because they structured past contracts to use future cap space and are not at the point where it can possibly be intelligent to borrow again.
They absolute have been borrowing future cap space for 2 decades. It’s the entire reason they were able to stay at the top of the league. They did it intelligently by primarily borrowing with premier players like Brady, McCourty, etc, but they did it, and the bill is still due. The fact that the draft capital over the past 5-10 years that was invested to build the current roster is much lower because of their success is more of the same.
Anyone telling you a sustained contender was built in less than 5 years is lying to you, and leveraging premium assets that just weren’t realized by the previous regime. The 2018 Rams Super Bowl losing team, in addition to the massive borrowing and future draft assets, had Donald (10) Gurley (10), Goff(1), Brockers (14) as top 15 picks they used to put together 2 seasons as a contender in a 5 year stretch. The sustained high capital in the draft is how “instant rebuilds” happen. There is no such thing as an actual instant rebuild resulting in sustained contention.
I agree that spend is make believe but kinda in the other direction since there’s always a way to structure a deal that fits into the cap. Either way, Kraft has said money spend is not an issue so unless you have a reference to the contrary, I can’t take that seriously.
It’s complete noise.
Not spending more now is because spending more now is insanely bad strategy with no redeeming qualities for a rebuilding team in literally all scenarios. You don’t spend future cap until you’re already ready to contend and your borrowing is to get over the hump.
I think the redeeming quality is getting a known good player that can put points on the board. Again, it’s not “future cap”. We’re not strapped for cash by any measure unless you have something that says to contrary.
Literally everything you spend hits the cap. Every penny you spend* that doesn’t hit this year’s salary cap is future cap space, by definition.
Borrowing to win 10 games instead of 6 makes it literally impossible that you aren’t a dogshit GM. Any sports personality who even uses the words “real cash spending” is telling you conclusively they know absolutely nothing about how building a team works. It’s a nonsense imaginary number that doesn’t mean anything (and doesn’t include anything incentive based because of when it’s calculated, making it even more idiotic to ever bring up in a discussion ever).
*except specific veteran minimum contracts, which count as a slightly lower number to keep the veteran minimum from costing guys jobs.
Not really. There are ways to wiggle around with bonuses and other financial tricks to sneak past cap. All that aside, you’ve said that we’ve cursed our future selves with past signings to which I literally cannot find on any cap statement anywhere. We’ve even had the coach saying we spend low and the owner explicitly stating that money is not a problem. Can you show me any source anywhere that indicates that the Pats are in a financial situation that makes them uncompetitive for offensive players in free agency? Are you perhaps just making a generic statement that we shouldn’t be competitive in free agency because it costs money? If so, that’s a weird one when it’s been proven that we have $100m less on the books than the Ravens.
All of those tricks change timing. None of them prevent the money from hitting the salary cap eventually. Excluding the veteran exception I mentioned last post, everything you spend hits the cap at some point.