Belichick Goes Wild at the Mall, an Update
OK, this is getting ridiculous. The Patriots this morning signed free agent tight end Hunter Henry to a 3-year, $37.5 million deal. Along with yesterday's signings and the acquisition of offensive tackle Trent Brown from the Raiders, New England has enough new players to make up over one-sixth of its 2021 opening day roster.
If Belichick ISN'T planning on getting a new quarterback by trade or high draft pick after this explosion of spending, if he plans to stick with Cam Newton as his starter, well, let's just say he's taking a risk that makes benching Drew Bledsoe for second-year man Tom Brady a 1-10 bet.
That bet had the biggest payoff in NFL history. Longshots remain longshots however, even if you've cashed one.
March Melancholic Mystery
For the first time in decades, I haven't filled out an NCAA basketball tournament bracket. (Last year doesn't count, no tournament). For the first time in decades, I didn't watch the NCAA selection show on CBS.
For one of the few times in decades, I didn't write a prediction piece immediately after said selection show. I even did it for free on a blog, which is just nuts.
I couldn't do any of those things because the tournament that starts tonight is meaningless to me. I have not watched a college basketball game on TV from start to finish or even for just its stretch, all season long. The sport just vanished from my consciousness in a decision almost totally subconscious.
This is a big deal in my personal development and/or regression. While by no means a College Hoops Knower on the level of a Charles Pierce or Bob Ryan, I was a diligent, nay, enthusiastic follower of the sport both as a professional, where I covered eight Final Fours, and amateur before and after my sportswriting career, dating back to my teenage years. And yet this season I just could not get into it or even summon the desire to try.
My retirement mental fan calendar was as regular as the actual calendar. After the Super Bowl, it was time for a deep dive into college basketball. After the tournament, it was time to gear up for Opening Day of baseball and the NBA and NHL playoffs. A little February viewing of those last two was in order as well.
Looking back on this winter, an amazing thing happened. After the final gun of Super Bowl LV, I haven't watched much sports at all, at least, not indoor sports. No college hoops, one or two NBA games, a few periods of the NHL, that's it. I did watch some PGA Tour events but was that fandom, or a nap aid?
Chalk it up to covid-19 and to a quirk in my sports brain I now recognize but will never understand. I can and have watched OUTDOOR sports held without live spectators since the pandemic began. Baseball, pro and college football, golf, auto racing, soccer, I immersed in them all with little disruption to the pleasure/addiction fix they provided. But indoor sports without fans, I just can't. To me, an empty gym or rink looks more like practice than the real thing, and Allen Iverson said it all about practice.
Live spectators add drama and spectacle to even such a sedate pastime as golf (every hacker has known the added stress/excitement of standing on the first tee with a crowd of onlookers waiting for their tee times). Basketball and hockey are melodramatic by nature. They need the chorus a full house provides to generate the proper amount of catharsis -- at least for me they do. Outdoor sports have enough space to allow clever television producers to avoid showing the absence of any/many fans. Indoor ones do not. To this viewer, that makes all the difference.
I assume there will be some spectators at tournament games. Otherwise, why hold them all in the same state? I might even watch a game or two. But I won't really care what happens. How can I? I know nothing about any of the 68 teams and probably wouldn't be able to name more than half of them. The only team I scouted was Virginia, and that's only to have read how more than half the team's in quarantine as of now.
College football and basketball are the most money-hungry of all sports, a considerable accomplishment in a world where there's European soccer. I'm past caring about that, just as I'm past caring about how TV rules all sports with a merciless hand so the college hoops show went on minus fans and on any given game day, some teams as the virus did its thing this winter.
I just can't watch indoor sports without a crowd in the arena. I know sports are meaningless and I love them anyway, but there's something about an empty gym that rubs my nose in that meaninglessness to a point I cannot tolerate.
That's almost surely a healthy reaction for my mind to have. I hate it anyway.
Online Commerce Often Leads to Multiple Purchases
In a break with past practice, Bill Belichick went on a free agent shopping spree yesterday. The Patriots signed contracts with tight end Jonnu Smith, defensive linemen Davon Godchaux and Henry Anderson, edge rusher Matt Judon, defensive back Jalen Mills and wide receivers Nelson Agholor and Kendrick Bourne. That's over 10 percent of an entirely new roster created in a single workday.
Was it productive work? Is more likely than not a chickenshit answer to that rhetorical question? It sure is, but that's the answer here anyway.
The four best-known of the new Pats, Anderson, Smith. Agholor, and Judon are competent veterans who in a tribute for capitalism enjoyed solid to excellent 2020 seasons. All seven but especially those four, were acquired for high prices, not top-dollar for their position markets, but close.
Well, what of it? It's only money, and a lot of it imaginary NFL salary cap money at that. The Patriots had the cap money to use. More to the point, Belichick had urgent need to spend it.
Every one of the signings was at a position where New England had few to no positive results in 2020. Their wideouts were woeful and their tight ends a nullity. The Pats' front seven combined an ineffective pass rush (27th in sacks) with an inability to stop the run (remember the Rams and second Dolphins games). The newcomers were not plucked from either the offense of the '80s 49ers nor Pittsburgh's Steel Curtain, but they almost certainly will be an upgrade from last season's crews, if only because it'd be hard not to be.
The awful actuarial table of NFL careers mandate that free agents are short-term solutions to franchise personnel problems. It's inaccurate to say Belichick has never before signed free agents for big money, but the results have been checkered. For every Darrelle Revis and Stephon Gilmore, there's been a Roosevelt Colvin and Adalius Thomas. It IS accurate to say the Pats have never before gone on such a binge of acquiring veterans to address glaring needs.
To be fair, it's been about 20 years since New England has had so many glaring needs. But there are two kinds of NFL personnel capital, salary cap space and draft capital. It's unusual for any franchise, let alone the Patriots, to use so much of the former while conserving all of the latter in a single offseason. Teams that splurge in free agency almost always do so in the almost always mistaken belief that a few big-name vets are all they need to reach the next Super Bowl. Belichick can't be under that illusion about his team.
The Pats did not address the position in most need of an upgrade -- quarterback. They could get by with Cam Newton, but signing him to another one-year deal is hardly a vote of confidence.
Free agency is not built to provide long-range personnel solutions, least of all at quarterback. Teams with long-term successful starting QBs just don't let them go unless they think they've reached the end of the line. That judgment is why Tom Brady became a Buccaneer. It wasn't correct, but one can see why Belichick came to his mistaken conclusion.
Free agents are how teams plug holes. Spending draft capital, either in a trade or by trading up in the draft to take a rookie QB of choice, is how teams get their hands on their QBs of the Future.
The Pats came into yesterday with a great many holes and left it with all their draft capital intact. I wouldn't put anything past Belichick, but I find it impossible to believe that is for the purpose of drafting a bunch of offensive linemen this April.
Marvin Hagler RIP
There was one overriding and irresistible reason to watch Marvin Hagler in the ring. You knew you were going to see a damn fight.
Hagler died yesterday at age 66, cheated of many years of his already successful retirement from the brutal trade he honored though, well, through his very brutality. He was a skilled boxer, ambidextrous in fact, but his skills were employed for his straightforward goal of inflicting the maximum amount of physical damage on his opponent no matter what he suffered himself in the process. He was a straight ahead fighter from the start to finish of his career, even in his career path. Hagler ducked no opponents, from Roberto Duran to Sugar Ray Leonard, in a sport where selective choice of foes is as much a part of the game as the left jab. It's made Floyd Mayweather a lot of money.
That approach made Hagler a terrifying opponent and a fighter who was enthralling to see in action. Go on Youtube and see his fight with John Mugabi, or if you haven't gone time for that, the amazing eight minutes in 1985 when Hagler and Tommy Hearns abandoned any notion of the Sweet Science for a brawl without pause until Hagler, bleeding profusely, knocked Hearns out in the third round.
That fight was 36 years ago. I defy anyone, whether they've ever seen a boxing match or not, to view it without excitement, even if only of the horrified kind, in their soul. Two fighters without pretense removing all pretense from their barbaric yet fascinating sport. Boxing is cruel. Boxing is vicious. Boxing does not speak all that well of the human species, except for the boxers themselves. Hagler was a boxer who made any thinking fan confront those facts. An honest fighter in the ring should at least have fans with honesty about themselves.
Honest fighters usually come to bad ends. I was fortunate enough to meet both Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali years after they retired, and both were physical wrecks, Frazier a bitter one, Ali a serene one. Hagler played it differently. He was honest about boxing and himself as well.
In 1987, Hagler fought Sugar Ray Leonard. He was skeptical about doing so, already thinking of walking away, but there was just too much money in the superfight of all the '80s superfights. In Leonard, Hagler met an opponent whose goal was much different than his own. Sugar Ray, whose punches hurt a great deal I assure you, was not looking to win a damn fight. He was seeking to win a boxing match according to the rules of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, which he did. The judges' decision for Leonard remains a source of argument to this day, especially here in eastern Massachusetts, but in this pay-per-view spectator's mind, it was the correct one. The manly art of self-defense concept is as legitimate a part of boxing as the knockout punch, and Leonard was a master of it.
And after that loss, which insured that a rematch would make even more money for all concerned, Hagler walked away. He went to Italy to make cheap action movies and wear impeccable Italian suits. When that petered out, he moved to New Hampshire and lived as quietly as he could. He had no desire to trade on his fame in the nostalgia racket.
Truth be told, he had no need to do it. His fights still spoke for him, captured on video for as long as anyone wants to watch 'em. Many did for as long as he lived. My guess is many more will for many many years longer than that.
It perhaps took too many words to come to the logical conclusion about Marvin Hagler. That video of the Hearns fight is all the obituary Hagler will ever need.
Tell Cam's Statistics to Shut Up
Seems like old times. Haven't written a word he's seen in 16 years, but Bill Belichick just couldn't wait more than a day to make me look foolish. My previous post suggested the Patriots' best solution at quarterback was to take a flyer on a top member of the draft class of 2021, so naturally Bill re-signed Cam Newton to another one-year contract yesterday, and at a price (6 million real dollars, 8 million in incentive maybe dollars) that means Newton will either be the putative starter as camp begins or a really high-paid backup.
Cue the howls of wounded outrage from the spoiled members of the New England fan base (a significant segment) and that section of local media that butters its bread by bear-baiting same. They are certain, with the conviction that only comes with selective memory, that Newton was the worst quarterback in the NFL last season, that's he's a washed-up bum who's the only reason the Pats went 7-9 and missed the playoffs for the first time in 13 seasons.
The howls are easy to understand. Outrage is way more fun than disappointment. The latter however is the proper response to Newton's 2020. He wasn't the worst quarterback in the NFL, just solidly below average. That's not good, or even mediocre. But to make Newton the lead villain in the end of New England's dynasty is incorrect to the point of injustice. It's also to forget the 2019 season where it took historic great Tom Brady just to make the Pats a playoff team, a season where the rest of the roster made Brady look mediocre himself down the stretch.
The prosecution always leads off. The macro case against Newton's performance in 2020 is familiar. He holds the ball too long in the pocket. He cannot make the short passes at which Brady excels and which were therefore a critical part of New England's offensive scheme. There were games in which Newton was so bad, even his main man Belichick benched him for nonperson Jarrett Stidham.
All of this true. But it's an incomplete truth. Newton indeed was supremely lousy in four of his eight losses as a starter, against the Rams, 49ers, Broncos and the December loss to the Bills. He was lousy in the win Cardinals coach Kliff Kingsbury handed the Pats for good measure. This is what one might expect. It takes luck for any NFL team to win when their QB stinks.
This leaves us with four other New England losses to account for. In three of them, Newton played more than well enough for the Pats to win. In the other, he was having an acceptable game -- until its last play. Let's examine these in more detail.
Sept. 20 at Seattle: Pats lose 35-30. Newton passes for 397 yards and a TD, runs for two more scores. Russell Wilson passes for five touchdowns. Newton stuffed on a run at Seattle goal line on last play of game.
Nov 22. at Houston: Pats lose 27-24. Newton passes for 365 yards and a TD. No turnovers. Deshaun Watson passes for 344 yards and two TDs, runs for another.
Dec. 20 at Miami: Pats lose 22-12. Newton is 17-27 for 209 yards passing, runs for another 38. Miami rushes 42 times for 250 yards and three TDs.
Now for the most interesting Patriot defeat of the season, the Nov. 1 24-21 loss to the Bills. Newton passed for 174 yards, not great, but better than opposite number Josh Allen managed. He also ran for 54 yards and a TD. And no one remembers, because in the epitome of Newton's 2020 season, Cam was leading a winning or tying drive as the fourth quarter neared its end, then fumbled inside the Bills' 15 trying to make more of an already successful run.
Fumbles are the most random element of football. These days, they are most often the result of the ballcarrier trying for superheroism when "damn good play" would be plenty. Can't speak for everyone, but a QB trying to do too much is my choice over one who won't.
Let's not go into the five New England wins where Newton had games ranging from good to excellent. There's no point, since his critics refuse to acknowledge they exist. Besides, there's really another moral to this essay than "Cam wasn't as bad as you thought." He was just that on too many occasions.
But on equally numerous occasions, New England AS A TEAM was just as bad or worse than Newton. Yeah, he was terrible against the Niners. So was every other man in a Pats helmet. When a team allows 250 yards on the ground, that ain't the quarterback's fault.
It is also doubtful that the quarterback alone was responsible for Newton's ridiculous disparity of 8 passing touchdowns and 12 running ones. This indicates that in the red zone, Cam was often asked to be his own Rob Gronkowski due to receivers, especially tight ends, who were a nullity in tight quarters.
Why is it that just as baseball fans have abandoned the idea of measuring starting pitchers by wins and losses, football fans, who're often the same people, have taken it up as a yardstick for measuring quarterbacks? It's even less valid for what's infinitely more of a team sport. That's why Deshaun Watson wants out of Houston.
Even using that false yardstick, Newton wasn't the worst QB in the NFL. He started 7 wins and 8 losses. He was below average by arithmetical definition. There are any number of areas on the Patriots' roster where 2020 performances were below average.
If Belichick has decided that his best use of the offseason is to address those other, far easier to remedy, deficiencies rather than the high-risk, high-reward, really-high-chance of failure pursuit of a superior QB to Newton, he could well be making a mistake. For all anybody outside the New England organization knows, he could be doing so anyway, with the Newton signing a Plan B, or even C.
But if Belichick has decided to stand pat with Newton, it's not insane nor stupid. It's only a big gamble, like almost every decision about changing or not changing quarterbacks turns out to be.
The NFL's K-Shaped Economic Recovery
NFL free agency begins next week and by necessity it will be a buyer's market. Strange but true, many of the sellers are perfectly OK with that situation.
The league salary cap for this season is $182.5 million, an 8 percent decline from 2020, due to the Covid-related revenue losses of last season. Gate receipts aren't the main source of NFL income, but they do add up to a tidy sum. The main way teams "manage" the cap is to backload contracts so as to push the financial day of reckoning as many seasons off into the future as possible, assuming an ever-rising tide of income will make that day less painful, so the Covid shock has left a number of franchises with dreadful formal cap situations. The Saints and Eagles have to reduce cap payroll (never to be confused with actual payroll) by over $60 million capbucks.
Other teams have oodles of capbucks to spend if they wish. This is a mixed blessing, since the main way teams acquire such imaginary fortunes is to stink on ice for seasons on end, with constant roster turnover and no veterans worth keeping driving payroll down. So to no one's surprise, two of the biggest cap fortunes belong to the Jaguars and Jets.
As Bernie Sanders could predict if he cared about football, there are many more franchises who are in need of more cap space than those with space to use. Therefore, not only will unrestricted free agents find fewer and lesser offers, veterans with 2019 market rate contracts may face release into the cruel market if their teams need to shrink their putative spending under the cap.
Sounds like another page in the world's longest sports book "How NFL Players Get Screwed by the Owners," doesn't it. And it is, kind of. And yet it may not be. The Cap Crunch of '21 also offers wise veterans the chance to bet on themselves with an excellent chance of a big payday NEXT March or the March after that.
As an example, let's take offensive tackle Trent Brown. It was learned this week that Brown was traded from the Raiders, who're cap-stressed, to the Patriots, who have a nice number of cap millions to play with. Brown will reportedly sign a one-year, $11 million contract with New England, a considerable pay cut from the $16 million he made with Vegas last season.
Brown MIGHT come off as relatively poorly as those numbers suggest, but then again, this deal could work as well for him as for the Pats. He's an excellent player when healthy but has trouble being so. Assume he's healthy and productive for New England in 2021. Brown does. He will then be a free agent once more in 2022, a veteran with a burnished CV.
He will also be a free agent entering a much different market. The Cap Crunch of '21 will almost surely be followed by the Cap Explosion of 2022 or maybe 2023. The NFL is negotiating a new set of TV contracts with its broadcasting partners and its demands are not modest. The producers of Broadcast Television's Last Hit Show are seeking 100 percent increases in rights fees from its network partners. According to reports that have been denied by all sides and thus appear quite credible, NBC, CBS and Fox have all agreed. Disney/ESPN is said to have balked, but they'll knuckle under. The threat of losing pro football to a streaming service such as Amazon Prime will keep the Mouse in line.
Twice as much TV money means the cap will go up, way up. It has to, since its based on a percentage of revenue. Players entering the market will find more takers offering bigger contracts. The guys signing one-year deals on short money this year will be the "what's the world coming to" contracts of tomorrow.
For Bill Belichick, who loves a bargain, and whose team, to be polite, has multiple needs on both sides of the ball, this spring offers the chance to acquire useful players as short-term solutions to those needs. As is always the case, some of those bargains will be more than worth it and some won't be. But at least there's the possibility Belichick can buy enough buckets to match the leaks in the Pats' roof -- all but the one that most needs fixing.
The owners would have to adapt the 1952 playing rulebook to alter the iron law of NFL economics. There's never gonna be a buyer's market for quarterbacks worth a damn. Dak Prescott is proof of that. The Cowboys QB staged a multiyear battle of wills with Jerry Jones, the most powerful and headstrong owner of them all, and Prescott won going away. He has reportedly agreed to a four-year, $160 million contract. This, in the year of the Cap Crunch and coming off a season in which he was injured for almost all of it.
Prescott is an excellent player, but nobody would put him any higher than fifth best among current QBs. (There's Patrick Mahomes, Aaron Rodgers, Deshaun Watson and yes, Tom Brady at the top). That might even be generous. Yet the Cowboys had no alternative but to make Prescott the highest paid player in league history on an annual basis because losing him was unthinkable.
The Pats already suffered the unthinkable. They lost Brady. The cost of finding even a stopgap 2021 quarterback is likely to range from $10 million for the Gardner Minshews and Ryan Fitzpatricks out there to $25 million for the services of Jimmy Garoppolo, assuming the 49ers want to dump him, which many NFL observers do and I don't. There would go a significant portion of all New England's dandy cap space, for a short-term kludge at the game's most important position. Most unsatisfactory, that.
It is hard to imagine Belichick trading way, way up in the draft to pick a rookie QB, betting the next five years or so of New England's future on the riskiest card in the personnel deck. But the cold logic of the NFL's K-shaped salary structure indicates it might be his only real chance to put the Pats' in working order to leave for a successor. Teams with superior quarterbacks on rookie contracts get the most out of their cap space no matter what that number is.
Belichick seldom trades up in the draft, it's true. But he has done it.
Belichick has never picked a quarterback in the first round, it's true. But he never had to. He had Tom Brady.
And now he doesn't.
