First, you're reading way too much into things if you think I'm somehow blaming Brady. All I'm saying is that he isn't capable of carrying an offense with this few weapons like he has in the past. And Brady has carried offenses arguably even worse than this in the past. He went to an AFC Championship game throwing to fucking Reche Caldwell and Jabbar Gaffney. None of that is to shit on Brady, the guy's 42 years old, after all. Some of the miracle working power inevitably declines when you lose some of the physical capabilities you had in the past. He's still a very good QB, and I'm happy to have him on my team.

Second, good Lord, are we really referencing Chris Hogan as a huge gap in the Patriots' offense? This is the same guy who everyone made fun of the Steelers' secondary for two weeks after he had like the first big game of his life in the 2016 AFC Championship.

But, yeah, losing Gronk, Amendola, etc. hurts. And it'd be great to replace them, but the thing is, replacing them (with anyone competent) is easier said than done. Players like Amendola, Welker, Stallworth, and even Hogan were all low risk free agency pickups/trades. The unfortunate reality of the NFL is, due to the salary cap, you can't really afford to keep all your now good players around when they turn out to be good. There will inevitably be at least one other team out there that can pay more. So you have to replace them. Big name signings are fine, but also usually very expensive, which the Patriots haven't been able to afford as of late. So you have to take your chances on less expensive players. Sometimes those players work out really, really well, like Welker, Amendola, etc. (as well as James White, who's replaced Dion Lewis just fine). Sometimes, they don't. Unfortunately, this was one of the years where they didn't, and combined with some really shitty injury luck, a Super Bowl run wasn't in the cards.

This is how the NFL works, though. Browse literally any fandom's forum for a recent star QB and chances are you'll run across some time where they talk about how the QB had to deal with a talentless team. Rodgers, Peyton, Brees, etc. This is how the NFL is supposed to work. It's not supposed to be easy to sustain success. Replacing your players is supposed to be really challenging.

I sincerely doubt Brady will leave; he'll either be back or retire. Regardless of what he does, though, I'm grateful to have watched him play.

Which is what makes giving up on AB after a few stupid texts all the more dumb. But you'll never see eye-to-eye on that; fact is, he never did anything else close to controversial while with the Pats, but apparently they drew the line right there, after not even two weeks. And along with it went the season.

It would've been one thing if the locker room wanted nothing to do with him, but as we've already established that was literally the opposite case. And if the league was gonna enforce a suspension on him  (even after still not finding anything to this day), then obviously there's nothing that can be done there.

But no. Instead of fighting to keep him until something untenable like that happened, they just got rid of him after less than two weeks of bad press. How can you honestly say they really tried their best? Seems like a big joke to me.

You truly cannot let this go, can you?

What he did while with the Patriots isn't the exclusive end all be all. It's also relevant if he undertook...let's charitably call it "controversial"...actions that the Patriots didn't know about beforehand. If New England is to be believed, that is the case.

Losing AB sucks from a talent standpoint, sure. But his actions speak for themselves. I'm not going to say much more about him as I've already made my position abundantly clear on the type of person he is and why I wasn't especially excited about him being brought on board in the first place. In regards to the Patriots, however, given that literally no other team has taken a chance on AB since New England, the case that the Pats are somehow being worse about this than everyone else is shaky at best.

Antonio Brown wasn't on any other team when this investigation started. Only reason the league can threaten to place him on the exempt list is because the Pats already ousted him, losing him the benefit of the doubt immediately. How were they gonna justifty just suspending him from active duty while still on a team, when they haven't even come up with any evidence yet?

This is almost wholly unrelated to what I said, but all right.

The league can and would most definitely place someone on the exempt list if he was in New England. If you legitimately think the NFL, the organization that suspended a player for four games, took a first round draft pick and fined the Patriots hundreds of thousands of dollars for underinflated footballs that can be adequately explained by a drop in temperature, would somehow be too afraid to put a Patriots player on the exempt list just because he's with New England currently or because they don't have sufficient evidence, then you have a very interesting view of the NFL to be sure.