I'm torn Ray. I
feel the same way about VW. When he's on/healthy, it's over at the A and B gap, whistle to whistle. He goes through times where the opposing O line takes on a bow-like appearance as they try to deal with him. At times. But at 33... at the NT position... you've got a guy you've got to pay for weigh-ins, you've got the Achilles injury to factor in, you've got the philosophy of "better a year early than a year late," and you've got an $8M cap hit the Pats aren't picking up. Another "placeholder"? Only if VW and his agent say so. For the kind of APY the Pats will want to pay him I just don't see it.
Let's look at some recent drafts...
2014 - We hit (or sort of hit) with 3 draft picks, Easley, Halapio (?), Stork. Garapolo shows promise - enough that he actually saw regular season action to push Brady (and it worked.) Not
too bad. 2013 - Collins, and that should be enough. The DBs and WRs from that draft include Ryan and Harmon - good enough for some starts - and Boyce and Dobson who really haven't panned out to date. So, still too early, but so far it looks like Collins has to be considered the big haul there. 2012 - Chandler Jones, Dont'a Hightower... and the rest, as the Gilligan's Island theme song puts it.
Now I have to add, the Pats always have most picks toward the bottom of the round, blah blah blah, and some of the DBs are considered terrible here, but are legit NFL starter material... just not when you have McCourty, Browner, and Revis on payroll. But we have to consider the Pats starters as coming in at a rate of about 2 per year. Then maybe we get an UDFA to hit every other year but that might be pushing it (kind of tired to do research but if someone can list the UDFA hits and prove me wrong I am happy to hear it.)
So we don't know what James White brings from '14, we don't know whether we'll get anything out of the receivers in '13, we sort of know what we have in Duron Harmon and Logan Ryan, and it's middling, not world-beating. OTOH, we got our Butler last year (and the 'Hawks got their Matthews,) and nobody knew what the hell would come of either until that Super Bowl.
Put the 2-hits-per-year together with the FA and cap pictures, and you begin to see the importance of keeping the guys who really do shine. We can't
count on (re)building through the draft if we overdo it on the FAs. We can't keep everybody, and Revis has given us one of those "nice problems to have." The thinking is that he's a force multiplier - the rest of the team gets better on D when you have a legit shutdown corner. Worth the spend if you find a special one.
So bottom line, I think somebody's got to go, probably more than one. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we'll plan for the deluge in 2018, and we have our eye on a blue-chip kid at a high school somewhere who we'll target with a high first round pick in 2019
... I dunno.
I just think we'll be planning to get value in free agency this year, part ways when we can't agree with an agent about the value that a player brings, and make the room for Revis. If there's a bidding war for him my guess is that we will fold if the money gets crazy - freeing up tons of cap money, but necessitating a lot of hole-plugging staring, but not ending, at CB (see the "force multiplier" effect).
All of this militates in favor of the "push it into the future" model, and I do think we'll do some of that - after all, that's the nature of most multi-year deals. But as I said, we'll be bidding some guys goodbye and good luck too... I don't think the Pats will just load up the future-years credit card. PS - all that said I wonder what Butler does in the off-season
You hate to say it on the strength of one game, but I would not be heartbroken if he turns into an every-down beast in the future, given the cost of veteran CBs.
