Hurley: The Patriots have me thinking about the Chicago Bulls

BOSTON -- The easiest thing to do in sports is to spout doomsday theories. Everything is bad, all hope is lost, the end is nigh. That kind of thing.

So to be clear, this is not that.

Yet when watching Robert Kraft's 16-minute meeting with reporters in Orlando this week at the NFL owners meetings, I couldn't help but think about the Chicago Bulls.

To be fair, it's not the first time. Shortly after Tom Brady left New England for sunny skies and friendly vibes (temporarily friendly, at least) in Tampa, with the Patriots having no plan whatsoever at quarterback, I thought ... well that certainly can't be good. The only real comparable I had was Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson (and Scottie Pippen) leaving the Bulls, a franchise that fell into irrelevancy immediately upon their departure.

Yet I reasoned that the Patriots were better off. They still had Bill Belichick, for one, and the roster wasn't quite as depleted as those 1998-99 Bulls. The Patriots could be fine without Brady. But as Jordan taught us decades earlier, life without the GOAT was going to be tough, and it could get downright ugly.

And to be fair, the post-Brady Patriots have thus far fared better than the post-Jordan Bulls did. But that's also an exceptionally low bar to clear.

The 2020-23 Patriots compiled a 29-38 record (.433 winning percentage) with one playoff appearance and finishing one game out of the playoffs in another season.

The Bulls went 66-230 (.223 winning percentage) in the four years after Jordan retired for the second time. They ... did not make the playoffs or even come close to doing so in any of those seasons.

Interestingly, the Bulls fired their head coach -- Tim Floyd -- in that fourth year, just as the Patriots fired Belichick after the fourth year post-GOAT. The Patriots certainly hope former player Jerod Mayo will be the leader who can guide the Patriots out of a 4-13 season. The Bulls entrusted a former player of their own -- Bill Cartwright, who like Mayo, had been serving as an assistant coach for several years -- to coach the team ... but he didn't help much. Chicago went 30-52 (.366) in Cartwright's first season, and he was fired after starting the next year with a 4-10 record.

The Bulls' stretch of missing the playoffs lasted six years. They didn't win a playoff series until the ninth year post-MJ, four years after Jordan's third retirement. 

Unfortunately for the Bulls, they've carried on in relative irrelevance in the 26 years since prematurely ending the championship window with the greatest player of all time. After winning six titles and reaching eight conference championships in a 10-year stretch, the Bulls have made zero NBA Finals and just one conference finals in the past 26 years. (They lost that lone conference finals appearance in five games.)

The Patriots, to be quite clear, are not there. They're four years out from Brady's departure and barely four fortnights away from Belichick's departure. The post-GOAT era has been rocky, sure, but we're talking about a handful of years and not a quarter of a century. 

Yet ... the words coming from the owner this week were not overly encouraging.

Words are just words, yes, but the lack of a clear direction is at the very least eyebrow-raising for an organization that got the Brady decision wrong and now has to be desperately hoping they don't mess up the post-Belichick era.

On Tuesday, Kraft said that his "hope and expectations" for the 2024 season involve a playoff appearance. Then he said he hopes the team doesn't struggle, and then he preached patience as the team onboards 20 new coaches onto the staff.

He said -- while wearing an imaginary "fan hat" -- that he "definitely" wants the team to draft a quarterback with the No. 3 overall pick. But he also said it would make sense to trade the No. 3 pick in order to acquire more picks and build more talent on the roster.

Kraft said that he's "actually excited" by the collaborative work of Mayo, Eliot Wolf and Matt Groh. But then he said, "We'll evaluate after the draft and see how that's gone, and decide where we go from there."

Kraft pinned most of the blame for Calvin Ridley choosing Tennessee over New England in free agency on Ridley's wife (mistakenly referring to her as Ridley's girlfriend) preferring life in the South. But then Kraft admitted that the Patriots' quarterback situation "might be the quarterback situation, as well."

Even his addressing of off-the-field matters was uninspiring, as Kraft claimed ignorance to the issues in the NFLPA workplace survey, even though the Patriots ranked poorly across the board a year ago as well. The promise of a large-project $50 million training facility -- when something more immediate can and should be done for the weight room -- won't help make Foxboro a desirable destination in the short term.

It was a series of mixed messages, coming a day after Mayo offered up his own, coming a couple of weeks after Wolf delivered a mission statement that has yet to come to fruition in any observable way. And though the franchise is in the infancy of the post-Belichick era and thus deserves some time to establish a new identity, a clear direction for the franchise has yet to emerge.

And as we still sit in the wake of the docuseries "The Dynasty," we can find some parallels between the end of Brady's tenure in New England and the end of Jordan's run in Chicago. In both cases, the top decision-makers in both franchises seemingly accepted the fact that the greatest player of all time simply had to move on. There was just no way to make it work any longer. A resigned acceptance to the end of Jordan's Chicago career is still difficult to comprehend, and the Krafts and Belichick shrugging their shoulders about the unavoidable end of Brady's career in New England is no different.  

Nobody's saying that, like the Bulls, the Patriots are doomed to fail for the next 25 years and beyond. To do so would be to be foolish and beyond disingenuous. We're not doing that. Not today, anyway. It is just worth observing how a team that employs a GOAT player-coach combination can dominate a league for a decade and never come close to that level of success -- or any level of success for a long, long time. (The results of the past 26 years have shown quite clearly that the Bulls' dynasty did not come as the result of Jerry Reinsdorf's brilliant ownership decisions.)

It's just difficult to get a feel for proper expectations -- in the extreme short term with the draft, in the relative short term with the 2024 season, in the long term with the health of the franchise as a championship contender -- when the owner who's more involved in football than he'd like to let on can't quite commit to what exactly he wants.

Without putting too fine of a point on it, there's a lot more at stake in next month's draft than the simple selection of a player. This draft could very well determine the direction of the franchise and, most importantly, reveal who is driving the train.