Patriots’ NIck Caserio Talks Upcoming Season

Yesterday Patriots’ director of player personnel Nick Caserio met with the media to discuss all things Patriots.

Here is the official transcript: (via Patriots.com)

NC: Well, good morning. I appreciate everybody being here this morning. It’s been a few months since we’ve probably got together, since Bill [Belichick] got together with the group, been a couple of months. [We’re] certainly excited. There are a lot of things going on here I would say with our team in the area of offseason program, winding down some of the draft visits, Celtics basketball so there’s a lot going on. A few things before we get started into some of the questions. Quickly just on the Hall of Fame nominees, it’s a great group. Certainly congratulations to those three players. [Raymond] Clayborn probably predates a lot of us in this room except for maybe Tom [Curran] when he was writing about him in his Saint Anselm dorm room. [He had] quite an accomplished career, 12 years, 161 straight starts, 37 career interceptions, a great football player. Mike [Vrabel] and Kevin [Faulk], can certainly speak a little bit more about them having been around them a little bit more. Those two players embody what the Patriot football program and what a football player is about. Kevin Faulk basically made himself into the great player that he was. There are stories that go back that he basically taught himself how to pass block. He didn’t know how to do it when he got here. [He] worked with Dante [Scarnecchia] to try and get better in that area and he embodied a lot of things that we look for in football players. [He] was as dependable, was productive, and he’s given back to football. [He’s now] coaching down there in Louisiana. It’s a credit to the career that Kevin has had. And Mike – Mike’s career kind of speaks for itself. He was asked to do a number of different things, some of which he had never done before. He probably thought he had the best set of hands of anybody in the NFL. Quick story, we go out there for pregame warmups and I used to throw to him before the game and if the ball ever hit the ground it wasn’t because of his hands, it was because the quarterback that was throwing was pretty bad. He always talked about his hands were better than Hines Ward but that was Mike. He played linebacker, played tight end, played free safety in practice. [They’re] tremendous nominees. We’ll see how the process goes but certainly a tip of the cap to that group and congratulations to them. As we kind of wind down here with the process, there are certainly a lot of people that have put in a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of people that are involved in the process. Certainly at the top of the list is Monti Ossenfort and his staff, nobody puts in more time. He has a tremendous amount of responsibility, he works diligently, he works very hard with myself and Coach Belichick and his staff – Smitty [Brian Smith], Lip [James Liipfert], DuJuan [Daniels] – those guys put in a lot of time, a lot of effort. It’s kind of a culmination of a full year process, kind of a 12-month process that we’ll start up here [and] really wind down here at the end of the week here next week. We’re excited for the opportunity that we have in front of us. We’re kind of turning the page. We’re trying to put together the 2016 team. We’ve kind of bits and pieces done that a little bit to this point, so we’ll continue that process next week or so and continue to add. I’m sure the composition of the team will change between now and ultimately when we first play in September, but that’s kind of where we are here for the time being so we’ll take some questions and go from there.

Q: What are some of your initial thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of this particular draft class?

NC: The reality is that the draft – there’s depth across all positions – I mean everybody always looks for what positions of strength, where is the draft deep. There’s depth throughout the entire draft. You can really find players all the way from round one through seven. Other teams have done it; we’ve done it through the years. So it’s not necessarily where they’re drafted or where they come from or how they get there, it’s just a matter of when you get them what they do when they’re there. Really every position I would say you’re going to find good football players top to bottom so it’s just a matter of assigning your value to that player, what you think the players role is going to be for us specifically, and then incorporating that into our program. We’re going through the process right now. We’re winding down but I would say by the end of it we’re only going to end up with X amount of players that we’ve considered drafting regardless of if its second round, third round, all the way down to the seventh round and then of course the undrafted component comes into play, which there’s a number of players that have come into our program through the years – the Dane Fletchers, the David Andrews, the Brandon Kings, all those types of players – so you just go through the process and you just try to identify the fits and the players that you think have a chance to fit into what you’re doing and then you pick them accordingly however it goes.

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