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Originally Posted by Buehler445
A couple things here.
1. Achieving success by accumulating draft picks and achieving success on the personnel side in the mold of Belichick are mutually exclusive. Belichick has had some horrible drafts. Truly horrible. Impressively horrible even.
2. I'm a production per unit salary cap. Low cost rookie contracts are a good way to get there. Belichick achieved that by coaching up scrubs. I mean, that and falling assbackward into an elite QB, but that aside. Belichick took low end guys and made them play assignment sound football and made them really outperform their contracts. Essentially he achieved value by coaching dudes up.
3. I don't really care how it happens, but we have to achieve better production with our salary cap dollars. Jones, Clark, Reed, Brown, shitting the bed is what murders teams - us specifically. I don't mind paying dudes of that caliber, but they have to perform. A bunch of draft picks is the same concept. Squirmin Herman Mother****ing Sack of **** Edwards taught us that. Going young for the sake of change isn't good if you draft ass on a stick.
The problem we face is our struggles aren't strictly on Veach. I'll be hard pressed to believe the problems in the various rooms aren't coaching and/or leadership. And that's problematic, because coaching reports to Hunt not Veach. Leadership is also problematic because it was good in 18, 19, and 20, but the same dudes leadership aren't good in 21? That's a difficult thing to quantify and as a result manage/optimize.
I mean, nobody wants to lock themselves in the nerdery, make a spreadsheet assessing values to all available personnel, email that bitch to Veach and solve all of our problems more than me, but it isn't that simple.
But yeah, I'm all about improving our production per unit salary cap by ever means available, including cheating the salary cap, which I've been advocating since they started talking about extending Mahomes.
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I don't disagree with any of that.
I think that defense, while still having an X's and O's foundation, is still a lot about attitude and effort. Especially in your front seven. Even more especially with a 4 man line. We've been SO burned by big contracts and immediate drop-off in level of play time and time again. Maybe that's not fair, but it IS what has happened, over and over.
When I talk about Belichick, I'm talking about how he just built solid defenses; not with huge stars in their prime (unless they were drafted there) but with decent, solid, fundamentally sound players. He mixed those with some over-the-hill vets chasing a ring that could still play specific roles like Seau, or Harrison. Of the stars they drafted (like Seymour) they let walk when the price got too high. But the thing is-they were fundamentally sound across the board.
when you spend big money on a free agent, it means you have less to spend on the rest of the guys; and we've got a ton tied up in 3 or 4 guys on that side of the ball which is not great but what's really bad is how poorly they're ALL playing. And when you look at the tape, they're giving really poor effort. They're often IN position to make a play and they just don't even look like they're trying.
Maybe Bill's thought is that guys get complacent with championships and big paydays. Ship them off and restock constantly and you've always got guys who are hungry for THEIR piece of the glory.
But yeah, of course, you always need to draft well, and you need your free agents to play up to their contracts.