BrooksMustGo

Now I know that there is a wild amount of man-love on this board for Vilma. However, where he goes in the draft isn't entirely within our control. If he's still there at #18, we might well take him.

What eats at me is the number of quality free agents available that are within our control to make a move on. Haz and company have yet to make a meaningful move to address either the CB or MLB position during his tenure. By deliberately choosing not to even schedule visits with one of the deeper FA CB pools in recent memory, it looks like the coaching staff is content with the status quo. By choosing not to even talk to some good free agents the coaching staff is saying a couple of things:
1. There are no free agents available that are better than what we currently have.
2. There are no free agents available that are better than what we can draft.

The status quo seems fine for these guys. Now Young was a good pick up, even though he's a 1 gap guy. We'd need a ruling from Tweeky here, but Clancy might be a nice gamble to bring in to play 2 gap for us. As a backup from the Steelers, he might make a nice addition and give us a real 2 gap guy.

Taylor and Vincent are both old, but I like our secondary better with either of them than the old guys we currently have in Ambrose and Carter. I'm not even going to get into the absolute refusal to even talk to the younger, quality CB's.

Short would have also made a nice pickup, or Dhani Jones. The only plus to Short signing with Washington is that makes it even more likely that Trotter gets released on June 1. But even with Trotter gettting released, I don't have a lot of confidence in Haz-matic to even schedule a visit with him.

The message of free agency this year is the same as any other year, "what we're doing is good enough". To hear the coaching staff talk, you'd think we were in the NFC championship game every season and were just one bad ruling from the refs from being in the superbowl.

But now for all you bargain hunting guys:
1. We're going to either pay Howard Kearse money or leave him as a huge cap hit under the franchise tag.
2. We're going to give Deuce huge money (I don't necessarily disagree with paying him more though)
3. We're setting ourselves up for Brooks cap number to skyrocket over the next 2 seasons.

We are not creating the Patriots here. We are going to be paying guys arguably too much. It looks pretty realistic to have 3 guys taking up 20% of next year's cap space. If we are going to pay that kind of money, why are we consistently refusing to address the gaping holes in the defense we have at LB and CB? Vilma may be good, he may be the next Lawrence freaking Taylor, but isn't is crazy to be pinning all our hopes on him falling to #18. Is it possible that out of the whole league we are the only team that possibly realizes he is the single best LB in the draft class? It is simply insane to continue to leave our heads in the sand and not address the CB and LB positions and think things are going to get better. Our poor play at LB and CB is not because of officiating or mental lapses, it's because we don't have guys who are capable at playing on a high level. As a result, we have painted ourselves into a corner during free agency and put ALL of our eggs in the draft basket.

This is stupid.