I wasn’t trying to say that Gettleman is bad at drafting, just that he hasn’t shown himself to be above average. I think a lot of people see this as an obviously bad move because they perceive Gettleman as someone who came to a bad team and built it into a winner, so I just wanted to point out that a lot of it was already built and that there isn’t really any evidence to say the Gettleman did a better job of adding talent than any other GM would have. On top of that he’s shown a troubling penchant for trading away mid-round picks. I don’t really like any of the trades he made, but the trade up to take Funchess was particularly egregious.
To answer your other point about getting younger players involved, let me make a few general arguments. First, we’re talking about two positions where you generally have multiple players on the field, so it’s not necessary to let your top player go to get a younger guy in the game. Maybe there were some team chemistry concerns, but we don’t know that. Second, letting go of veterans to get young guys more time is something you do when you have no talent at a position or too many talents players at one position. It’s not something you do when your veteran is the only talented player you have at that position because even if the young guy you play in his place flourishes, the team isn’t any better than when you were playing the veteran. Third, assuming you’re trying to compete for the current year’s championship, you never dump a quality veteran to make room for an incoming rookie. Even if the player you drafted is a really good player, odds are their rookie performance won’t be as good as that of the veteran, and conventional wisdom says you want the veteran around for the rookie to learn from.
With regards to the specific moves I mentioned, Kelvin Benjamin has yet to produce a season as good as Smith’s last season with the Panthers or first season with the Ravens. Yes, he broke 1,000 yards receiving as a rookie (on a very high number of targets), but he also dropped several passes and ran sloppy routes that sometimes lead directly to interceptions (thinking of the Eagles game in 2014). I still don’t think we have enough evidence to know if Benjamin was a good pick or not, but even if he goes on to have a good career, I would rather have spent the extra $4 million to keep Smith around for 2014. I liked Bradberry’s rookie season better than Benjamin’s, and I’m more optimistic about his future, but it still wasn’t as good as Norman’s 2015 season, and he could have had the same season starting as the 2nd corner with Norman. Yeah, letting Norman go saved $11 million, but saving money isn’t everything. Eventually, you want to spend that money to win football games, and spending that money on Norman could have won a lot of football games in 2016.