I lost track of this pissing contest, but here's my take:
It's laughable that some of you are comparing Ballard to Polian.
Polian was obviously a great GM, but his teams did obviously underachieve when it came to championships. So I see rn's point that it would have been nice if Polian had gone for it more in FA.
I do think we need to realize that Polian was operating under much different salary cap rules back then. Most notably the rookie salary cap wasn't in place until '11, so he had to dedicate a much higher portion of the salary cap to the draft class. I would like to think that he would've been more aggressive in filling holes via FA and been able to keep some guys that really hurt losing (like David Thornton for example) had he been operating under today's salary cap rules.
Something that Polian was really good at was that he knew which positions were critical to success in the NFL and those were the positions he heavily invested in: QB, DE/pass rush, WR, OT. This realization is something that our current FO sorely lacks. For example the OL situation: no fucking way Polian hands out all pro LT money to a LG w/ back problems and then sticks a complete turd like Pryor next to him at LT (Chris may have done something like that but not Bill).
Something else that was really good about Polian is that he didn't get too hung up on physical traits. A lot of all time Colts greats like Freeney, Wayne, and Sanders wouldn't have been drafted by Ballard b/c they wouldn't have met his traits measuring stick.
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