2001-2004 Brady wasn’t even remotely close to the best QB ever though. He wasn’t even thought of as the best QB at the time. Bill also won 11 games in 2008 with Matt Cassell so he clearly had built a pretty good team, even when you strip out Brady. I think BB clearly knows a lot about success.
My analysis is a little different. I think it’s a multitude of factors contributing to where this team currently is but the biggest reason, I think, is simply misevaluation of draft picks and FA acquisitions. Bill the GM has had a rough stretch and perhaps some of the reason is because of fundamental issues on not adjusting to league-wide trends or not properly evaluating positions.
He clearly knows defense but I’m not sure BB the GM has properly evolved on the offensive side of the ball.
I think the tricky part in evaluating BB the GM is that even objectively good personnel departments have stretches of misses and mediocre/bad rosters. Depending on your view of the guys, Schneider, Colbert, Roseman, Newsome (before he stepped down) are some of the best GM’s in recent years or, at least, some of the guys with enough good results to stay entrenched in their positions for long enough to have a big sample size. All of those guys have plenty of draft flops, crappy or underwhelming rosters, free agency misses, down years etc.
No GM in modern history other than Bill has put together 20 years of good-great rosters consecutively. And even considering the “Brady effect”, most of the 2001-2019 Patriots teams were good rosters loaded with talented guys. Yes, some had weak position groups (2006 WR, 2008-09 CB, etc) but they generally had a roster which probably could have been a playoff contender with a solid-not Brady option at QB.
So is this just the type of dry spell which is normal for any good GM? Or has the game passed by BB?
As much as some of his moves have flopped (most of the moves on offense), any GM would struggle having to replace not just Brady but almost an entire core that got old/expensive at the same time. 5 years ago they had Gronk, Gilmore, Hightower, Chung, McCourty, Thuney, Mason, young JC Jackson, Jason McCourty, Edelman, James White, younger better versions of Flowers and Guy, etc
it’s been a huge amount of decay along with long time high end contributors leaving. That they’ve managed to rebuild the entire defense in 4 years and maintain a very good, if not quite as good, standard is impressive. The offense, well, replacing Gronk/Edelman/White/good OL is hard enough let alone finding a QB.
Absent nailing a franchise QB in 2020-21, I don’t think BB was ever going to be able to sustain success after the dynasty era ended simply because the volume of premium talent that retired/declined due to age or got too expensive was insurmountable. There’s finite high draft picks and available free agents and missing on those is a league wide problem not a BB-specific one.
not defending Strange, Thornton, JuJu or some of the other bad moves, and perhaps it is time to move on. But we’ve seen Bill adapt before, we’ve seen him bring in playmakers for high picks (as recently as trading a 1st for Cooks). I struggle with whether or not he can’t identify the types of players who win on offense in todays league or if he can’t/won’t go out and invest the resources in them. The Chiefs have struggled recently to replenish their offense, the Bills have struggled to find other options other than Diggs etc.
