Hello and Welcome to myPatsBlog!

My name is James and I am a New England native. I am a diehard Patriots fan and I wanted to create a place where I could share my thoughts and hopefully have conversations with other fans. My entire football experience has been from the viewpoint of a fan but I enjoy it all. Obviously starting with watching the games themselves, but even the business side, the capology and especially the Xs and Os type strategy. I don't claim to be an expert in any of these areas and so these posts will be solely my opinions that I would be more than happy to discuss in the comments. This being my first major post, I wanted to talk about what I envision this blog becoming and what I hope to achieve by writing in it.

To start, I want to describe the content that exists. As of right now there are three pages: the blog posts, the salary cap figures, and a suggestions page. The posts is where I will update regularly (I am hoping for a minimum of once a week) where I will be talking about free agent signings, draft prospects and analysis of league wide news during the offseason and focusing on upcoming opponents during the regular and postseason. The salary cap page contains a table with my estimate for the current amount of cap space that the Patriots have based mostly on news stories and similar tables on other sites. I will try and provide sources and links whenever I can. The suggestions page is exactly what it sounds like, I am new to this and would appreciate any feedback.

There are at least two other pages that I would like to eventually add once given the time to develop them. First, is a roster page that would accumulate statistics for each player on the team. Now aside from the standard statistics I would like to start to keep track of a few statistics of my own. I think people largely look at the standard statistics and think they are the only things that matter. For example, standard stats may show a wide receiver's receiving yards and touchdowns, but not how well he blocks in the run game. The position that this would affect the most in my opinion is the offensive line. Offensive linemen accumulate next to no standard statistics and make it hard to evaluate at a glance. I understand this will be a large task to undertake that may include a large amount of film watching, but I am willing to try.

Second, is a page that has analysis for the most recent game and/or a preview of the next game. I anticipate logging these pages into blog posts, but I would like them to always be available. If ever possible, this is where I'd like to get into the strategy of the game as far as my knowledge can take me. As I said before, I'm not an expert in this area and I will likely be getting my terms from Wikipedia or another blog. I frequent ESPN and BleacherReport, and I may comment on their analysis as well. I particularly like  Chris Brown's (no not that Chris Brown) analysis of games and may link to them, if he happens to write about one.

Finally, my end goal for this blog is to get my ideas out there so I can share them with others. Ultimately, I don't care if what I think is right or wrong. What I seek is a discussion and a debate on these topics to enhance my knowledge and enjoy the games even more.

I have a few things lined up for this weekend, mostly focused on the draft. I am not a fan of making mock drafts because I don't know the college players or the other teams well enough, and even draft expert Todd McShay said that the hardest team to predict is the Patriots, so I'll leave that to others. What I want to focus on instead are players that I find intriguing and where I would be happy with the Patriots selecting them.

Thanks for reading and please feel free to contribute in the comments or the suggestions page!