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Shaunodon on 24 October 2019
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MTZehvor said:
Shaunodon said:

I'm not even gonna bother replying to your whole 'piecemeal' argument here, because the whole thing can be blown up by the fact you actually believe Belichick orchestrated every step of the situation, when the evidence we have shows that wasn't the case.

https://popculture.com/sports/2019/09/27/bill-belichick-robert-kraft-antonio-brown-cut-disagree/

"Curran wrote that Kraft was all about cutting Brown while Belichick understood the decision, but he did not agree with it."
""After more conversations this week, I’ve come to understand that unanimous decision wasn’t easily reached," Curran wrote via Deadspin. "Belichick accepted the decision and understood it. But he was by no means leading the charge to move on — and if Kraft hadn’t insisted, Brown would probably still be here.""

Hence why I'd always referred to the problems being from the Patriots management and organisation, rather than just singling out Belichick. Even though the Patriots are masters of being tight-lipped and not leaking any stories, there's clearly some disharmony and disagreement on some levels (players, coaches, ownership), about some of the choices being made. And I doubt that was helped when not long after the owner made an executive decision to cut AB, he then went live pre-game on TNF practically begging Gronk to come out of retirement, when everyone could see by the end of last season how badly he was breaking down on both a physcial and emotional level.

You can choose to keep speculating or 'spitballing' about what you believe might've happened behind the scenes, and how perfectly they must've handled it based on your trust of the organision. But I'm just following the breadcrumbs of all the information we do have right now, and to me, it leads to some clear dysfunction on some level.

Yeah, Tom Curran, the guy who said Jimmy Garoppolo was probably going replace Tom Brady by 2017? The guy who insinuated that Brady was using his Netflix documentary to get back at Kraft, peddling the very story you complained about earlier? Get real.

Look, I respect Curran more than the average Boston sports reporter (especially so for retracting that tweet later on), but none of these so called sources have an insight into decisions being made on that high a level. It's all just insipid speculation about dysfunction and how the team is falling apart on the inside. Stories get blown up to ridiculous proportions. It happened in 2014, it happened in 2017, and it's happening now.

This wasn't a story that was blown up to any degree. None of the mainstream sports media have even mentioned it to my knowledge, and it was difficult to even find the articles about it. It was just a nugget of info that got buried in the fallout of everything.

And what exactly makes his insipid speculation about dysfunction any less reliable than your spitballing about what must be happening behind closed doors? At the very least, he is closer to the team than you are. So if he's trying to report things like this, there must be something going on, with some kind of tension.
Not that I'd ever bet my life on the total accuracy of his reporting, but where there's smoke there's fire. From reports before AB joined the team (Kraft texting Brady about whether he was in on AB, in hindsight probably because he himself didn't really want him), and then while AB was with the team, when he was apparently outraged to hear about the allegations. So it's not like Mr. Kraft being the main reason for AB being cut just came out of nowhere.
And it's not difficult to figure out why he wouldn't want that attention right now, especially of that nature.