It seems everywhere New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft goes these days, he can’t help but try to bury Bill Belichick a little more.
In an appearance on the Breakfast Club promoting a campaign for his charity, Kraft said that he should have placed more “checks and balances” on Belichick’s control over the Pats’ football operation.
“He had full control over everything,” Kraft said.
That control led directly to a divorce between Brady and the Patriots, something Kraft maintains he was against.
Chris Curtis of WEEI’s The Greg Hill Show called this “disingenuous” Tuesday.
“When it comes to the most valuable commodity on the roster, Robert Kraft was in charge,” Curtis said.
“You sided with Bill Belichick, which is a logical decision, though I disagreed, that a brilliant mind would last longer than a brilliant athlete. You were wrong. But we all make mistakes. Move on,” he continued.
Kraft seems to be stuck in a way of thinking much like John Goodman’s Vietnam veteran character in The Big Lebowski: Not everything is about Bill Belichick, Robert. He seems to be the only member of the Patriots’ former triumvirate that can’t take criticism.
“Bill has taken criticism and has owned up to it,” Courtney Cox said. “Tom has taken criticism and has owned up to it. Robert, truly, has never taken the criticism for anything that's gone wrong in the organization. It's always been pointing blame.”
The picture that Kraft has painted of the Patriots organization prior to Belichick’s firing seems to be one where he had zero power or influence.
“Do you hear how consistently powerless Robert Kraft would have you believe he is with an organization he owns without any other investor? It's just the Krafts,” Curtis said.
Kraft can’t have it both ways. It’s either he had no influence in football decision-making, like he told The Breakfast Club, or that he was a main architect of the dynasty, like ‘The Dynasty’ documentary lays out.
“I don't put it on Tom Brady. I don't put it on Bill Belichick either. I put it on Robert Kraft that [Brady] left,” Greg Hill said.
“He was willing to tell Bill Belichick, you can't put the franchise tag on Tom Brady, so why would he have not been willing to tell Bill Belichick, ‘Hey, we're going to pay Tom two years, 25 million a year, and that's what you're doing.’ You can’t have it both ways,” Hill said.
In Brady’s final Patriots contract, Kraft agreed to a provision which said he could not be franchise tagged. If he were conducting the interview, Chris Curtis proposed a question that would’ve addressed that hypocrisy.
“Wait a second, Robert, you just told me that you had no checks and balances, while simultaneously you're telling me at the most important position, at the biggest inflection point of your organization's history, you elected to intervene and remove the ability of the organization to franchise a guy, thereby giving up all leverage in a negotiation.
“You can't say that you gave no checks and balances and you then made the final decision at the most important position, at the most important time,” Curtis said.