Bill Belichick is one of the greatest head coaches in NFL history, but his GM skills are probably on the level of Bill O’Brien.
Just last week, Patriots owner Robert Kraft seemed to throw shots at the head coach and team’s recent failures in the draft.
“Really, the teams who draft well are the ones who will be consistently good,” Kraft told reporters last Wednesday. “I don’t feel like we’ve done the greatest job the last few years and I really hope and believe I’ve seen a different approach this year. In the end, it all comes down to what happens on the field and how people execute and you really don’t know how good a draft is for at least two years.”
According to a report from Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer, one instance came when Belichick reportedly went against the opinions of his scouts to draft WR N’Keal Harry over other players in the draft.
“Where most teams had draft meetings with their scouts in February and April, the Patriots would have theirs with scouts in December and February. And at that early point, it’s tough to set the board, with two and a half months of information still to come. So from there on, the scouts would just be gatherers, which frustrated plenty of them, and played into the exodus in the scouting department the last few years. It also, as some saw it, led to misses like N’Keal Harry in 2019. Harry killed his 30 visit that spring and had a college coach, Todd Graham, who was close to Belichick. In that end, without more input from scouts who preferred Deebo Samuel and A.J. Brown, the coach wound up leaning on his own experience with Harry, rather than the red flags his scouts planted, and lost a golden opportunity to fill a hole on his roster.”
The draft issues never hurt in the past since they always had Tom Brady behind center, but that era is now over and everything else is starting to show in the light.
