When the New England Patriots traded Jimmy Garoppolo to the San Francisco 49ers for a second-round draft pick, many people wondered why the Patriots didn’t get more of a return for the budding signal-caller, and now we might have an answer.
It all boils down to how the Patriots do business.
While it is believed that Bill Belichick didn’t want to send Garoppolo to a team that would derail his career, the trade also was an exercise in how the Patriots go about trading players, as FOX Sports’ insider Jay Glazer revealed Thursday on 98.5 The Sports Hub’s “Felger and Mazz.”
“What the Patriots do also,” Glazer told hosts Michael Felger and Tony Massarotti,”is they strategically do put people kind of where they want, right? The Jamie Collins thing went down,’alright, you want out? We’ll send you to Cleveland.’ They love Garoppolo. So (John) Lynch played (in New England) which people forget, so him and Belichick are very close.
“They put it out like it was him and the head coach, the relationship he’s had with Mike (Shanahan) and Kyle, and that was part of it, but it was also John Lynch was a big part of this as well. They didn’t open it up for everybody there.”
And when Felger asked Glazer why the Patriots didn’t open up the Garoppolo trade to the highest bidder, the NFL insider dropped a little knowledge about how the Patriots operate.
“That’s not how they do business,” Glazer said. “They did it with Chandler Jones too, they called the (Arizona) Cardinals, right? They didn’t shop him either. They didn’t open it up and I didn’t understand it … Everyone has a way of doing business. That’s how they do business.
“They don’t open it up. They don’t do that. They have certain teams that they know they can do business with and that’s it. They don’t like their business out there.”
The Patriots’ way of doing things has gotten them five Super Bowl titles in the Tom Brady-Belichick era, but their refusal to trade talented players to the highest bidder has cost them some valuable assets along the way.
