It doesn’t take a three-time world champion coach to take a few pictures off the wall.
You could do that. So could I. So could your friend’s wife, who doesn’t know the AFC from AFLAC.
The next step for that decorated leader, Bill Belichick, isn’t so easy.
After gutting the football operations area of Gillette Stadium of its wall decor, the coach better hope that the players he was sending that message to have the ability carry it out.
Because if they don’t, attitude won’t matter.
The NFL remains a talent business, and as the Patriots try to hand their team over to a bunch of neophytes, the fact of the matter is that those guys, first and foremost, need to be good enough.
Often lost in the cuddly stories of the dynasty years is that guys such as Rodney Harrison, Richard Seymour, Mike Vrabel, Tedy Bruschi, and Ty Law weren’t just smart and disciplined and tough, they were playmakers and gamers, too.
So there’s the story of 2010 training camp, and the season that will follow it: Are the 24 draft picks from the last two years good enough, and if they are, can the coaches have them ready to compete at a high enough level to maintain the franchise’s astronomical standard of success?
One way or another, the next half-decade for this franchise could well depend on it.
“It’s a fresh start,’’ said cornerback Darius Butler, a prospective starter and one of the second-year players expected to make a leap. “We had nothing to do with those Super Bowl rings, or those championships. It’s a fresh start. We’ve got to make our own mark, working every day.’’
Here’s the thing: For as much talk about how the Patriots got younger this offseason, their roster remains among the league’s oldest. Only five teams have New England beat in the category of “elderly,’’ according to ESPN.com. That’s even with the aforementioned haul of freshmen and sophomores dotting this year’s training camp facebook.
The reason why underscores the importance of those first- and second-year players. The Patriots’ draft history between 2006-08 doesn’t quite represent a black hole in roster building, but it has shoved the team into a fairly deep ditch, which is why the club remains older, on balance, than more than five-sixths of the league.
Only tailback Laurence Maroney and Stephen Gostkowski remain from 2006. Only Brandon Meriweather is left from 2007, and while Randy Moss and Wes Welker were acquired with picks from that year, that hardly exonerates the club’s college scouting process. Fact is, the team drafted eight players after Meriweather, and one made it to 2008. That was Mike Richardson, who was cut out of camp in 2009.
