Fridays with Bill

by John Powers

  “Even now [mid-October] you look at some of the players that are out there and there are three or four guys that I’m surprised they’re not on NFL rosters and if we had an opportunity to put one of them on our roster it would be something we’d have to think about. But you get to this point in the season and it’s hard to make moves at one position because you usually don’t have enough depth at the position to do it. Usually it’s more of a one-for-one swapout. We’re swapping out this guy for another player at that position. But if you really feel that strongly about a player and his ability, then either you make room or, when you have room, then that’s a player that gets a lot of consideration.”

  PLAYER POOL

  “Every week we talk about personnel and we go through the players that are on our roster, the players that are on the practice squad, the players that are available that are out on the street that aren’t with any team, the players that are on other teams’ practice squads, and anything that might have changed from the previous week.

  “For example, players that maybe were injured in preseason and they’re getting healthier. Maybe they’re not ready to play now so the team did an injury settlement with them, but they’ll be ready in a couple of weeks or they’ll be ready in a month. Other players that we have on what we call our short list. If we were to go to somebody if we needed a player and he gets signed by another team, who’s the next player? What guys do we want to bring in for workouts based on, do we need a physical on them? Do we want to evaluate them? Is it a player we know? Maybe we don’t need to work out a player that we know or have a lot of familiarity with, but maybe a guy we don’t, a younger player or a guy that pops up somewhere along the line.

  “You try to stay on top of the preseason games but in all honesty it’s hard to watch a couple thousand players in preseason. So those first two, three, four weeks of the season you can really go back and take a closer look at the preseason games and zero in on a particular player that flashes at you. Then maybe you can go back and watch him in college and do more work on him. Those players might surface on a practice squad and things like that.

  Belichick posing with country singer Kenny Chesney during 2017 camp. (photo by John Tlumacki)

  “It’s a constant process with no ‘We have to have this many guys in’ or ‘We have to have this many players on this list.’ Sometimes you can have five emergency receivers and no emergency tackles or whatever it happens to be. Where does your next player come from? He can either come from your practice squad or he can come from a player that’s not with a team or that’s not practice-squad eligible. Unless you put him on your team you don’t have him but he might be your next guy. We go through that every week.”

  PERSONNEL DECISIONS

  In a high-velocity contact sport, injuries are so frequent that the NFL has a nine-page policy on reporting them. Like all coaches, Belichick and his staff have to determine whom to put on the PUP list (Physically Unable to Perform) during the preseason (those players can return by Week 6 of the regular season) and whom to assign to injured reserve, which is a season-ending decision. More years than not, the number of Patriots on injured reserve is in double figures.

  “All personnel decisions are difficult to make. There’s not any player on our roster or our practice squad that we don’t think is a good player or that we think has no future. If that’s the way we felt about them then they wouldn’t be here. So we feel like every player on the practice squad and certainly all 53 of the players that we have and even some of the other players—some players on PUP, some players that are on injured reserve—we feel like all of those players have a future and would have a role on the team, too. Could we keep one over another? I’m sure that all those have been discussed or debated at some point here, sometime along the way over the course of the last few months. So there’re really no easy decisions with players like that.

  “If any of them had clearly established themselves then we wouldn’t be talking about it…. So the fact that they haven’t, whether that’s a situation where they’re not ready or they’re still developing or maybe they just didn’t have the opportunity to do it yet and we just don’t know until they get that opportunity. Those are decisions that you talk about and could go either way. There are a lot of different moving parts and a lot of factors that weigh into it and in the end you just have to try to decide what you think is the right thing to do. The more obvious it is, the easier the decision is. The less information, the less real hard data that you have to go on…until it’s actual true performance, then there’re more question marks.”

  TALKING WITH RIVALS

  “You talk about personnel with teams all the time. It’s fairly common. There’s less of it now [mid-October] because teams are pretty well set but in the off-season and heading into the training camp period and during training camp when there is a lot of juggling of rosters going on, you talk to other teams about a lot of different personnel. And you talk to teams that would help you but don’t want to help another team. Sometimes there is a flow of information there, too. It’s not always about getting somebody. It’s more of just knowing what is going on with that team and what’s going on with certain players. It’s more of an information flow. The actual ‘I’ll trade you this guy for that guy’ thing, those are, I’d say, relatively few and far between. But the information flow on players is much greater than that.”

  CUTDOWN CONVERSATIONS

  “There is no set formula. We talk about our players and what our needs are. What we want to try to do, who can do it. There are a lot of different points of view, from the position coaches to the coordinators to the special teams and so forth. Simultaneously, you have the personnel department, Nick Caserio [director of player personnel] and his staff, evaluating players on the other 31 teams as well as ours and making comparisons. Are there other players relative to the ones we have, some of which are available, most of which aren’t? It becomes at some point a culmination of pulling all that information together and making a decision.

  “Certainly there have been a lot of phone calls that come in and go out on various subjects and related personnel and decision-making and exchanges of players and so forth and so on. Sometimes it’s on the run, sometimes its, ‘Okay, we are going to meet at a certain time and go over it.’ But sometimes things come up on the run and you have to take it as they come…. I’d say most of the calls relate more to exchanging information than, ‘Here are seven players we want to trade; which six do you want to trade?’ and then turn it into some big blockbuster trade.”

  ADDING DISCARDS

  “We’re not expecting teams to draft guys in the third round to release those players. So later draft choices and free agents, we identify those players on the other 31 rosters going into training camp. Here’s four or five guys from each team that are based on the position, if they don’t keep all of the players at that position then somebody is going to be out there, whether it’s a player from the draft or maybe a veteran player. Who knows? So Nick Caserio and Dave Ziegler [pro personnel director] and pro personnel and scouts track those guys throughout the league. We monitor them and the guys that are available we follow up on. A lot of players that get released in the 53-cut that we might be interested in then re-sign with their team’s practice squads and those players are never really available. Then there are other players that don’t, for whatever reason, and we’ve worked out dozens of them…. Some of that is a function of the player. Some of it is a function of our situation. Some of it is a function of roster spot availability based on what our other practice squad needs are relative to depth and also relative to practice.

  Sometimes there are guys out there that we would like to add to the practice squad. We just don’t have room for them. Sometimes there are guys that we add to the practice squad that maybe we’d rather have another guy but we need the player at that position because of the practice needs. It’s a little bit of a balance of that. When y
ou can find a player that you want at a position that you want to add a guy to, then that’s a pretty good fit.”

  EARLY-SEASON TRADING

  “Historically you find that there’s still a decent amount of roster movement in those first two or three weeks of the season. Just trying to strengthen your roster where you can, and then after that it’s more a reaction to events or something that’s happening on your team that you need to address to change. But I think those first two or three weeks there is still a pretty good opportunity to juggle things around to try to strengthen your roster and maybe address depth concerns that we probably all feel like we have when you make the final cut down to 53.”

  IN-SEASON TRADING

  “To bring in a player now and teach him your system is tough because even if he learns it on paper or in a playbook and is actually going out there and doing it there are limited opportunities. So you trade for a guy and by the time you get him ready to go the season is over.

  MID-SEASON TRADES

  “Generally speaking it’s hard to trade guys around the fifth, sixth game of the year because in football there is such a transition period. To bring somebody onto your team now and have to teach him a whole new system and then learn it and really be functional for you in the 10 regular season weeks that are left is asking a lot…. If it’s a new guy coming onto your team at a third of the way through the season it’s a lot different than bringing a new guy on at the end of August when you have the full 16 weeks to go. So it makes it a little bit harder. I think that’s why you see less of it. I know baseball is a team sport and all that. I’m not saying that. But playing third base and playing left guard, there is a lot more integration that needs to be done on a football team, whatever position a guy plays, than what my sense of it is in baseball playing left field. I don’t know how different left field is from one team to the next. I’m sure there’s some differences but I don’t think it’s quite the same as what we go through.”

  PREPARING MID-SEASON PICKUPS

  “Having them know what to do to be able to get out on the field is important. We’ve got to do a good job of teaching it, obviously condensing or streamlining information because you can’t get the whole playbook in. And they’ve got to do a good job of working hard to learn it and specifically learn that game plan. So a lot of times you try to get them on the game plan first and then the next week you get the next game plan but maybe you can start to add some things to it and eventually over time be able to catch up on the overall nomenclature, terminology, more of a comprehensive understanding.

  “And that varies from player to player, too—how experienced they are, how much experience they’ve had in a system similar to ours or things that they can relate to or where there is carryover. Every one is a little bit different. Each of us learns differently. Some things we pick up quicker than others, so it is individualized between that player and whichever staff members and his position coach are a part of that. Getting him up to speed, covering what he needs to know for that game, but also getting him acclimated into all the other aspects of our program, too. Not just the plays, but there are a lot of other things they need to learn or fall in line with.”

  LANGUAGE BARRIER

  “If you get into a habit of saying certain words and those words now mean something different in our terminology then those are habits that have to be broken because they’re just counterproductive. They mess us up because what they mean to the player they don’t mean to anybody else…. It happens out there all the time where a certain formation or a certain play will happen and a guy will say something and we all look at him like, ‘Who are you talking to, because we don’t have that?’ But to him it’s something that he’s learned and he’s dealt with for a long time in his career and it means something to him. But that’s just not a term that we use and they have to break that habit and get into using a term that means the same thing in our language.”

  DOWNSIDE OF MID-SEASON TRADES

  “You bring in a player this late in the year that doesn’t know your system and hasn’t been with you. At this point in time we’ve had over half the practices for the entire year that have already occurred because of the number we have in training camp and in preseason. To bring in a player now and teach him your system is tough because even if he learns it on paper or in a playbook and is actually going out there and doing it there are limited opportunities. So you trade for a guy and by the time you get him ready to go the season is over.”

  Belichick brandishes the Super Bowl trophy after the astounding comeback against the Falcons in Houston. (photo by Barry Chin)

  TRADING DEADLINE

  “You need more, there’s less available, it’s a shorter season. You’re trading for a guy for just a short amount of time. How quickly can you get him ready, how productive will it be, was it really worth it? Is it worth it to the team who is trading away the player to get not very much for somebody versus just keeping him and playing with him even though you get something for him but it isn’t really worth it? You’d rather have him for those seven, eight games, whatever is left, than some pick at the end of the draft that you might not think has a lot of value, especially if you’re worried about your depth at that position with the player that you’re moving.

  “Usually when you have that kind of depth you see more of those trades in September when the value is higher and teams have more depth at that position so it’s easier for them to move the player because they have other guys at that point. But two months later they have less depth at that position and they’re less likely to move them. That’s just one man’s opinion. It’s not a survey of the league or anything. It’s hard to get a guy ready in a short amount of time. I don’t know much about baseball but maybe a third baseman on this team, put him at third base on the other team and let him hit. How much is there involved? I’m sure there’s some but it’s not like playing left guard, having 20 different protections and two dozen running plays and a dozen different defenses you have to block every week. It’s a little more involved.”

  PRACTICE SQUAD PHILOSOPHY

  The NFL allows clubs to keep 10 practice players on hand to fill in for injuries and the Patriots usually are at the limit. While those players are guaranteed a minimum of $7,600 a week, the more valuable ones can make significantly more. Many practice players either have been or will be on a regular season roster and can be signed by another club, who must immediately give them a jersey number.

  “We’ve had players that when we look at our practice squad we would say, ‘Okay, these players could be activated, they’re our next guy. If something were to happen here, if something were to happen there, that would be our next guy.’ There are other situations where if something were to happen at that position that practice squad player probably wouldn’t be the next player. It would be somebody else that’s not on your roster and it could be for a couple different reasons. One is the player’s development—we think he’s going to develop into a player but he’s just not ready now.

  Other players have more versatility and can do different things for you and they can practice in two or three positions and help the other players get ready but we don’t feel they are quite at the developmental level to be regular roster players. As the player improves, sometimes that changes. Maybe you don’t think he’s going to be and then he is, and we’ve certainly had players like that…. Players improve. Hard work, technique, physical development, and all those kinds of things.

  “There’s a lot of room to develop and we certainly can recite a lot of offensive linemen that fall into that category. We can also recite a lot of them that are on the practice squad that never played in the NFL. If you really feel like the player is a player and you don’t want anyone else to have a shot at him you try to find a way to keep him on your roster. And if you’re kind of not sure, then that’s probably why they’re on the practice squad.”

  PRACTICE SQUAD MAKEUP


  “Your practice squad players give you depth on your roster so you can theoretically bring them up and put them on your roster. So there are eight [now 10] guys right there, depending on what position they play or what they do, that could help you in one way or another potentially. But 10 guys aren’t enough to support a whole football team. We don’t have a kicker on the practice squad. There are a lot of things we don’t have on the practice squad that if we needed one, we’d have to get one somewhere else unless you had some way to handle it on your team….

  “Every week there are things that have changed on your team. There are things that have changed with what’s available on the street. There are other players that have been released from other teams or guys that have been dropped off their practice squads. There’s a constant turnover there, I’d say until probably about halfway through the season. Then everybody is pretty much settled into where they’re at. Normally at that point teams are losing players and they have to bring a replacement in. Whereas now [late September] there’s turnover that’s occurring where teams are trying to upgrade their personnel or find better combinations.”

  PRACTICE SQUAD PROTOCOLS

  “Say a team signs a player from another practice squad. You have to keep that player on your roster for three weeks, as opposed to signing a player that’s not with a team who you can bring on and take him off…. Say you have a spot and you bring on a guy from another team’s practice squad, put him on your team, and then you get an injury that week. Now you have to bring in somebody else to help you at that spot but you don’t have the flexibility of dropping the guy that you brought in the week before…. So when you sign somebody off a practice squad there’s an opportunity cost to it. I’m not saying it’s not worth it, but I’m just saying that’s the cost to it. You have the player, but you have the player. You can’t do anything with him, either, so that limits your options if something else were to come up.”