New England Patriots: Bad decisions leading team down slippery slope

The New England Patriots have sunken to levels not seen for two decades and there’s nothing evident that’s likely to slow that long slide into oblivion.

It had to happen sometime. Tom Brady leaving the New England Patriots was a sports-world altering event. For those young fans who have known nothing but Brady’s brilliance, welcome to reality.

This is what football is like in any of a number of NFL franchises all the time. It’s called hopelessness.

That is where the Patriots football team finds themselves now. Out of the chase. Out of the race. Irrelevant.

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Meanwhile, meanwhile, a perennial loserville team far south in Tampa Bay is now enjoying the benefits of the player the Boston home team drafted, allowed to flourish, and won monumentally with.

But in an act of colossal imprudence, the team kicked this still effective icon to the curb and forced to seek his just due elsewhere.

So where does the responsibility for this calamitous turn of events wherein a team that was 8-0 in their first 8 games last season (admittedly, due to a tomato-can schedule), now resides at 2-4 and is likely to be competing with the clueless Jets for the bottom spot in the AFC East which has been their fiefdom for 20 years?

The responsibility lies at the top. At the very top at the hands of the owner, Mr. Robert Kraft, and the head of football operations, Mr. Bill Belichick. It was these two decision-makers who evidently dusted off the greatest quarterback and the greatest player of all-time, thank you, Mr. Brady, and allowed him to leave for another destination.

If ever a player should have been afforded the opportunity and honor of playing his last game in a stadium and for a franchise for whom he had toiled arduously for two decades, it was No. 12.

Yet, Kraft and Belichick, to whom he has ostensibly ceded the ultimate authority for the team’s direction, determined somehow that Brady was neither worth the adulation he so richly deserved nor was he due even the common courtesy of being remunerated even close to mediocre players at his position who couldn’t deign to tie his proverbial shoelaces.

While it was painful to see No. 12 leave, one cannot in good conscience blame him for exiting a franchise that he may feel has treated him with discourtesy and disrespect. In fact, he should have been valued by this team more than any other player in their history.

Possibly, the desire to demonstrate that the Patriots could win without Brady finally motivated the team to allow its most prized asset to leave after having been treated with less respect than even a routine veteran with a few years experience. We may never know the real rationale.

One thing does seem clear though, the emerging situation of hopelessness and haplessness into which the team seems to be sinking is painful to say then least. Painful though, especially in light of the fact that the all-time greatest player in the franchise’s history still has a great supply of petrol in the tank as they say, and could have still been leading the Patriots to victories.

For years, in spite of poor drafting and lackluster free agency decision-making, the Patriots have been elevated by the mere presence of Brady at quarterback.

Yet, the club’s leadership evidently failed to acknowledge the fact, which virtually everyone else in the football world did, that Brady was the cog around which the entire successful machine revolved.

This unfortunate, premature, and misguided decision has now seemed to have consigned the Patriots to the lower echelons not only of the AFC East but also the NFL generally.

This is and will be an ignominious fall from grace for the New England team whose unprecedented success for two decades should have been extended by even more years with Brady at the helm of the offense.

Soon there may be talk about who should be the next coach of the Patriots. Mike Vrabel of the Titans would be a terrific choice. He’d certainly have my vote.