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Although the circumstances were not as agitated as at the moment when Adrian came out of the coma and Rocky offered not to mess with Creed anymore and Adrian said that he wanted him to do something for her and the big idiot approached and she said: “Win ”When the bells began to ring, the motivations for the Patriots when they spent as drunken rebels last week were identical.
The best football organization in the last 20 years has come off the record and signed big checks because it wants to win.
And it did so because it could and because the planets aligned themselves with the Patriots, who by a mixture of chance and strategy found themselves in a position to have an enormous amount of cap space – thanks in large part to the $ 25 million difference between where the limit would have been had it not been for the pandemic and where it is.
“It’s like investing in the stock market,” owner Robert Kraft told Peter King for his last Football morning in America column. “You take advantage of market corrections and inefficiencies when you can, and that’s what we did here. We’ll see. Nothing is guaranteed and I am very aware of that. But we are not in the business to be in the business. We are in this business to win. “
The opportunity to go all-in came from the rare situation of having so much cap room – and having a squad that desperately needed more talent.
“We had the second or third largest cap room at the start of the free agency,” said Kraft to King, who points out that the Pats were third, with $ 69 million more. “This year, instead of having 10 or 12 teams competing for most of the best players, there were only two or three. And in my 27 years as an owner, I have never had to invent so much capital before. “
There is irony in the result, however. The Patriots chose in 2021 to do what the Patriots privately ridiculed for doing.
“[W]we always make fun of teams that spent a lot in the off-season, ”said Kraft to King. “So we know that nothing is guaranteed and I am very aware of that.”
This is what makes this experiment so fascinating. Whether it works or not, the Patriots are consciously and deliberately doing something that the Patriots have resisted in the past, because the Patriots believe it doesn’t work. This year, as the Patriots recovered from their first losing season since 2000, opportunity and need collided. Let’s find out if the end result is chocolate and peanut butter or a much less flavorful combination.