So long, sucker! Moss dealt to Vikings

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Mike Parente, GoLocalProv Sports Editor

Wanna buy a house in Lincoln: Moss paid $1,250,000 for a brick home in Lincoln, Rhode Island. Built in 2000 and set on just over four acres, the home includes three bedrooms, three and one half bathrooms, three-car garage, and 3,846 square feet.

Randy Moss was right. The Patriots don’t want him back next year. They don’t even want him this year.

According to the NFL Network, New England is 99 percent close to completing a trade that would send Moss back to his original team, the Minnesota Vikings, in exchange for a third-round draft pick in 2011.

Have the Patriots given up on their season the way the Red Sox did in July when they declined to make a deal at the trade deadline? On the surface, this appears to be the biggest boner of the Bill Belichick era. Let's analyze.

Moss entered this season in the final year of his current three-year contract, scheduled to make $6.4 million in base salary. From the start, Moss made it clear he wanted to remain in New England and even went as far as to say he felt “not wanted” during training camp because the team had yet to contact him about a long-term extension.

Moss took it a step further following New England’s Week 1 victory over Cincinnati, unleashing an unprovoked tirade in which he reiterated his desire to stay with the Patriots and claimed his initial comments in training camp were taken out of context.

Among the gems following New England’s 38-24 win over the Bengals: “If you work for somebody and if your boss comes to you, sometimes you want your boss to tell you you're doing a good job. ... What I'm trying to say is that I get a lot of negative publicity off of any word I say. The word that I used this week was ‘unhappy,’ and I don't know who took it but it got back to me and that started the dominoes. I'm not saying that I'm not appreciated here, but I would like to feel that sometimes.”

Good luck trying to decipher Moss’ true intentions. The reality is most athletes equate respect with a pocketful of cash, which means Moss may have felt slighted because the Patriots hadn’t stepped to the table and paid him the way they paid his quarterback, Tom Brady, in the offseason. In fact, Moss’ Week 1 sermon came just four days after Brady signed a four-year, $72 million contract extension that makes him the highest-paid player in the NFL.

The big question now is how this will affect New England’s offense. Since Moss’ arrival in 2007, the Patriots have transitioned from a quick-strike, ball-control offense to a team more than willing to beat you on one big play rather than nickel and dime you to death.

Brady and Moss clicked from the start. In ’07, Brady set an NFL record with 50 touchdown passes, 23 of them to Moss, which also broke Jerry Rice’s single-season record of 22 touchdown catches. The dynamic duo never got a chance to recreate the magic the following year when Brady suffered a season-ending knee injury in Week 1. They reunited in 2009, and Moss finished with a more-than-respectable 13 touchdown catches, 83 receptions and 1,264 yards, though his effort came into question at times, particularly in a miserable loss to Carolina in which Panthers’ defensive back Chris Gamble said Moss “shut it down.”

Anyone who’s followed Moss’ career knows he’s dealt with his share of controversy. He walked off the field in his final regular-season game as a Viking before time had expired and he essentially admitted he didn’t “focus” as much in Oakland because the team stunk.

Still, he’s a unique talent and arguably the best deep-ball receiver in the NFL. Even when he’s not catching passes, he’s a problem. As Brady said following Monday’s win over Miami in which Moss failed to catch a pass for the first and only time in New England, “He's a big part of our offense, but when they take him away, really what it does is opens up other guys, and they're really fortunate to have him on their team. Even though he didn't have a catch, He's a big part of the win. He doesn't ever say anything. He understands sometimes that's just the way it goes.”

Logic suggests the Patriots are in trouble without Moss because they don’t have anyone else on their roster capable of filling the role as a deep-ball threat. Wes Welker and Julian Edelman are slot receivers and rookie Brandon Tate has proven to be more of a special teams’ ace than a legitimate wide receiver, but perhaps this trade signals a shift back to the pre-2007 Charlie Weis era of short-yardage passing and the utilization of the tight end.

When Weis was the team’s offensive coordinator from 2000 to 2004, the Patriots were far more diverse in the way they attacked defenses. They ran multiple tight-end sets and installed the screen pass as a major weapon in their game plan. The latter will be difficult to do with Kevin Faulk out for the season, but the Patriots appear to have hit the jackpot in this year’s draft with rookie tight ends Aaron Hernandez and Rob Gronkowski, so expect to see more of them as the season progresses.

There’s no doubt Moss gave the Patriots a weapon most teams only wished they had, but his presence was sometimes a liability, too. When Jets’ cornerback Darrelle Revis suffered a hamstring injury against the Patriots in Week 2, Brady threw two second-half interceptions trying to force deep passes to Moss when other receivers were open. With Moss gone, so is the temptation to air it out.

As of right now, this move makes no sense, unless the rumors of Moss requesting a trade are true. The offense will suffer without Moss, even if they use the tight ends more than they have in the past. With the way this defense has played, the possibility of falling behind early in games is more and more likely, and not having a major deep threat makes it difficult to cut into a deficit when time is of the essence.

Obviously, they had no intention of re-signing Moss next year, so the Patriots wanted to get something for their investment before he walked at the end of the season, but do they really need more draft picks? They’ve wasted so many of them in the past few years and now they’ll have two in each of the first four rounds in 2011. Given their recent draft history, there’s no guarantee the player selected with the pick they received in exchange for Moss will even make the final roster – assuming they don’t trade the pick before they use it. Unless they package that pick in a deal to get a veteran who can contribute immediately, trading Moss for draft picks is senseless.

Lastly, you have to consider what kind of message this trade send to the rest of the team, particularly Brady. At 3-1 entering the bye week, the Patriots don't appear to be giving up on 2010 -- it just doesn't make sense -- but by all accounts Moss was a likeable guy in the locker room and a solid teammate. Brady nearly cried at the podium after the Patriots traded his former favorite receiver, Deion Branch, in 2006. Let’s see how he reacts to this one.