I hate it when my favorite players get cut...

I first read the news over at 'Cursed to First'. Big Willie McGinest has been cut by The Patriots due to salary cap reasons.

Damn.

Sometimes the cold reality of the NFL just plain sucks. Despite a series of groin injury problems earlier in his career, Willie has been one of the Patriots' best players over the past 12 years. Since putting those injury problems behind him, Willie has proven himself to be an unstoppable force on the Pats D. The man is simply a sack producing, offense disrupting, machine.

The problem is that Willie also happens to be 34 years old and although he is still a high quality player, as was evidenced by his record-setting performance in the playoffs this past season, his cap number of almost 7 mil is just too high for a player of his age. (Hey, can't a fellow thirty-something get some respect? Yo. Willie is still a playa.)

Hopefully Willie will be back with the Pats, but the word on the street is that there are several teams out there who may be interested in procuring his services. Guess we'll just have to wait and see... as always.

In the meantime, for those of you looking for more Pats news, I'll point you to several quality sites to check out.

Patriots.com has a very good article looking at what the Pats next off-season moves might be.

Tom over at Patriots Report has been writing some extremely informative posts looking at the Pats offseason and their potential draft moves.

Pats Pulpit has also been putting out some great Patriots off-season info as well.

Finally, props go out to Miguel over at Patscap.com for the awesome salary cap info his page provides.