NFL Draft 2015: Bill Belichick Discusses Why He Drafted Jordan Richards And Geneo Grissom

Feb 23, 2015; Indianapolis, IN, USA; Stanford Cardinal defensive back Jordan Richards catches a pass in a work out drill during the 2015 NFL Combine at Lucas Oil Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports

Q: How do you rank the intangibles of him coming from a football family – his dad played and coached at Tufts. Does that play some type of role in the evaluation?

BB: I think you’ve got to look at each one separately. There are a number of kids in this draft that have those kind of connections, I’d guess you’d call them, with either family members, fathers, uncles, whatever, and that’s in varying degrees. It maybe adds up. Sometimes it doesn’t add up.

Q: Were you in the NESCAC at the same time as his dad?

BB: I don’t know. What years was he there?

Q: ’75-’79.

BB: Yeah, I was ’71-’75. I don’t know.

Q: What is it about the Stanford program that David Shaw and Jim Harbaugh before him run that has these guys NFL ready in terms of being mentally capable as well as physically?

BB: Well I mean, I’m sure when Jim [Harbaugh] was out there, he probably ran as close to an NFL program as – that’s what he knew. That’s Nick [Saban] at Alabama or Greg [Schiano] when he was at Rutgers or Pat [Hill] when he was at Fresno or Kirk [Ferentz] when he was at Iowa. You know those guys that have gone back into college football from the NFL a lot of times just take whatever they did as an NFL program, so the players are kind of accustomed to those demands. I mean, it’s different because they’re going to class and all that, I get that, but just the football part of it: the meetings, the walkthroughs, the offseason program, all the demands of the program, the training, the film study on their own, all those things, whatever they are. Then when they come into this league, a lot of times it’s an adjustment, but it’s not as much of an adjustment. I don’t know. I can’t speak specifically to that program, but from what I understand – we have Cam [Fleming], we have Tyler [Gaffney] – we have guys you can talk to about that. They didn’t seem to be overwhelmed by our program. I’m not saying that wasn’t a jump, but not like we might see from some other guys – terminology, all that stuff. But if that’s what you’re used to, it maybe doesn’t seem all that bad.

Q: Are there any positions you think you need to address on your roster?

BB: We’ll do what we do with every pick: we’ll take a look at the options and do what we think is best. [We] can’t manufacture players. Whatever is up there is up there and we’ll see how that extrapolates into our roster and our opportunities. I think at this point there’s a little bit of draft strategy involved too. Maybe you think you need to take – maybe you might have one guy rated higher than the other, but you might want to take the lower rated guy first because of draft strategy, somebody else you think might want him or whatever. So there’s sometimes a little bit of that. Each situation is different, each pick is different, each player is different, so how they fit on to the team and how we would see it, we’ll just evaluate each situation on its own. I can’t really sit here and say what we’re going to do, although it’s nice tomorrow to be able to have the second pick, so we only have to think of one team before us instead of 31 where you really don’t have any idea what’s going to happen in those 31 picks. At least with the one pick, as long as you have two guys, you going to get one of them, if in fact we stay there and pick. So, we’ll see how it goes.