Patriots’ NIck Caserio Talks Upcoming Season

Q: You’ve added quite a few free agents across the board in different positions. Does that take some of the pressure off of some of the upper level draftees to start or contribute right away?

NC: Look, every team goes through change during the offseason. You lose players, you sign players. We signed our share of players probably at a similar point to where we were last year. You make additions to your team but even when you make draft decisions I would say you sort of make them independent of one another. So, regardless of maybe you’ve signed a few more players at one positon relative to another that doesn’t necessarily take you out of somebody if you feel – there are a lot of factors that go into it. Maybe a short term basis, maybe you look at a player on more of a short term basis versus if you draft a player hopefully he’ll be in your program for three to four years, however long it may be. I would say we’ve built a team to where we are to a certain point but it doesn’t necessarily change our overall philosophy or how we’re going to try and add players to the team. We’ve talked about this in years past, say [Nate] Solder, we drafted Solder. He came in and basically he played jumbo tight end and right tackle because we had Sebastian [Vollmer] and we had Matt Light. Just because we had Matt and Sebastian didn’t necessarily take us out of drafting Nate. You try to make the decision that you feel is best for your team based on the players that you’re looking at on the board.

Q: With so many players coming from a spread-style system in college, what factors go into whether or not you think they’ll be able to make the adjustment to an NFL system?

NC: I think you have to go through your process. You have to spend time with the player. You have to understand what they’ve been asked to do so that’s whether it’s a pre-draft workout, a pre-draft visit, an interview or whatever it may be, you’re trying to ascertain information from them and find, ‘OK, what were they asked to do?’, and say, ‘Ok, well here’s what we’re going to ask them to do. Do we feel that he’s equipped enough to make that transition, handle that adjustment and that information?’ So, you have to go through your process. Part of like I said, the on-campus visit or the interview, we’ll go through an instillation, whether it’s a rookie minicamp instillation, we’ll install part of our offense and ask them here’s how we teach it, here’s the play, we’ll go through it. OK, then you go out there and you walk through the play, you actually see how much they can retain. So there are a number of things that you can do to sort of anticipate how they would handle making that transition but the reality is that until you actually have them you really don’t know, because maybe you find that their curve is a little bit quicker, it doesn’t take them as long as originally you would’ve thought. You just kind of have to go through your process of gathering information and then make an assessment about how you feel that player is going to project into what you’re going to ask them to do.

Q: How much does your pre-draft evaluation process change when you make changes to your coaching staff in the offseason?

NC: As far as which aspect?

Q: If you guys change a positional coach that perhaps has a certain idea of how he wants a player to play, does that change your evaluation of players during the offseason?

NC: There is a lot of back and forth. We talk I would say regularly with Bill [Belichick], myself, and there’s a lot of communication back and forth. The coaches are involved in the process. You’re trying to take all the information, put it all together, and then make an assessment of how you feel that player is going to adjust or project what you’re going to ask them to do. Like I said, sometimes it takes players a little bit longer relative to others. There’s a lot of information that goes back and forth. There’s a lot of dialogue. We meet on a regular basis because in the end we’re trying to get it right the best we can. The reality is that the way the draft is designed it doesn’t always work out. I mean honestly at times it’s a 50-50 coin flip. That’s just the reality of it. So even if you think it’s going to go a certain way, it may not go and you try to figure out, ‘OK, well what can we do better or how can we adjust it?’ We’re always trying to look at different ways of doing things, look at our processes, whether that’s playing, whether that’s coaching, whether that’s scouting, whether that’s in the weight room, on a multitude of levels and just try to figure out if there’s something that we can improve how can we improve it and then how do we implement that improvement moving forward.

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