Posted on 04/26/2008 9:40:09 AM PDT by mainepatsfan
Well one good thing about Miami signing their pick before the draft day. Signing the other first round picks should go pretty quick since the high contract has already been established.
The WR is strictly a return guy but a hard working type so I hope he stays.
Hiring Capers was a huge win for the Pats. They will likely see some improvement from Merriweather, they will get good production from at least a few of the bodies they have signed and the speed midgets who run up and hit you will be interesting to watch. I see a fast, hard hitting and aggressive secondary over the next few years.
The LB position was bolstered with Mayo and Crable and Hobson was a great pick up since he knows the system which is very hard to grasp. We wanted youth and speed and we picked up 3 LBs, one is 26 and the other 2 are in their early 20’s. If Thomas plays at the level he did in the SB then the LB corps has been upgraded all in all over what we started with last year.
The return game is improved which means Hobbs and Maroney are not playing crash dummy on special teams, Jackson will be starting the year healthy and fighting for his pro career.
A back up QB who will have some time to learn the game. Expect the Pats to invite a solid veteran to camp in order to back up Brady.
Seymour needs to come into the year in good shape and the stage is set for another romp through the league. I won’t predict another 16-0 season but 13-3/14-2 is well within reach. The younger players will see significant time over the season and that should give them great depth.
QB? No Prob
WR? No Prob
RB? No Prob
TE? Should be good enough
O-Line? Got exposed but the Pats’ failure to ram the ball on a smaller defensive front in the SB was a huge screw up
DL? With Seymour you ready you are in great shape with Wilfork, Warren and Greene
LB? No Prob
DBs? Should be more than adequate
P/K? Should be more than adequate
You know, oddly enough soccer, even though it shuns competitiveness at the World Cup level, has a great way of dealing with crappy teams, at least at the English leagues level. They'll send the worst team of the season down to a lower division each season; and promote the best team of the lesser league. That's kinda cool.
That west coast travel schedule is absurd.
Pats in SF—I may actually go to that one—haven’t been to a 49er game in 15 years or so.
Eat your heart out NE, we just signed Wes Welker’s evil twin, Danny Amendola.
I’m aware of the way English soccer demotes the worse teams teams to a lesser division every year, and replaces them with the best teams from that lesser division. I agree with you that’s a pretty good idea in theory, but, of course, it has no applicability to American team sports and leagues for a variety of reasons.
Still, the chief value of legitimate competition in team sports - from the perspective of the knowledgeable and mature fan - is the competition itself. Winning is “entertaining,” but in a different way than arts and music and comedy, etc. Losing is disappointing or even saddening or in rare instances, maddening to the losing team’s devout fans. But, barring a tie, someone has to win and someone has to lose every game.
Obviously, there is a certain “entertainment” value, which should be secondary to the competition value, built into team sports by the very nature of the contest. Little intervention from a centralized authority is needed to enhance it. In each sport, that value has qualitative differences from other sports, as the devotees of each can appreciate. Your comparison to chess is very misleading; it is a competitive game, yes, but not a sport, even though some idiotic lefty media might cover it in their sports reporting. The problem with women’s basketball is not a lack of competition or “entertainment,” merely that the public is (fortunately) discerning enough in general to see that the quality of the athletes is no where near that of men’s basketball.
“Entertainment” has several shades of meaning, although many a leftist attorney or agent thinks that professional team sport athletes are interchangeable with real entertainers. The fact is that they are in lines of employment more dissimilar than similar.
Hope Bo knows football /obscure
Not so obscure, I still remember that.
Too bad for the Cowboys fans who were rooting against us last season. >:)
-Eric
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