Kraft talks winning, Welker and Belichick
On his belief that staying at the top is harder than getting to the top:
The way I say it is, ‘Success is a lot easier to attain than to be able to sustain’ because there are so many forces, when you’re privileged to win, a lot of things happen internally, is it having certain players feel that without them you never would have won, certain coaches, certain people in the front office, certain owners, and it’s great when you win but it’s good for everyone to exercise a little humility and understand it really is a team effort and a lot of things coming together and look at our – in ’08 when we won 18 games, we thought we had something special and we came so close and there were just forces at work that didn’t allow us to win and have that perfect season and believe me, it was a great shock against all of us. Just a few things changing, little things changing – the egos…things would have been a lot different. There’s acts of God and there’s chemistry between people and just the bounce of the ball. I mean, you think of those last few minutes – Asante (Samuel) holds the ball, or (David) Tyree wouldn’t have made the catch, they call Eli (Manning) down, anyway – I’ve learned that you’ve got to just have a steady course and stay that middle zone and not get too high or too low, though I’ll tell you, losing is still a lot worse feeling than winning. We want to do everything we can to put ourselves in the best position to avoid losing.
On "Suck for Luck" and whether he anticipates the league addressing the idea of teams purposely losing games in hopes of being the top overall draft pick and able to select Stanford QB Andrew Luck:
This is an issue that has been brought up many years – I think that’s a very poor philosophy. First of all, Andrew Luck, I know his dad, he ran NFL Europe, he played in the NFL, he’s the AD down at West Virginia, he’s a good man, and so you know that the young man comes from good football gene pool but no one knows. No one knows what’s going to happen and to develop a culture that allows that to happen in your locker room, no…If it’s the last game of the season, you might decide to take chances to learn about some of your players and for the future, but we would never do that. That would be a very poor philosophy because you just never know. So no, I wouldn’t like to be one of those three franchises today and I’m pretty proud of our football organization when you think back to the season where Tommy went down in the first 15 minutes and how we were able to go 11-5, it’s a great credit to our football people and coaching staff.