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August 15, 2006

Belichick's morning chat

Sorry for being a bit late with the morning press conference details.

Patriots head coach Bill Belichick said this morning that his team has started looking toward's Saturday's game with Arizona, but used the extra day of work yesterday to focus on team-specific fundamentals.

There were a couple of interesting topics brought up, including rookie tight end David Thomas, who has been pretty impressive since camp began. New England's sixth-round draft pick out of Texas, Thomas is 6-foot-3, 248 pounds and ended his career with the Longhorns as the school's career leader in receptions (98), receiving yards (1,367) and receiving TDs (15) for a tight end. He has been garnering attention for his versatility.

Belichick: "He’s got a lot of things that he’s doing. He's involved in all the phases of the kicking game, he’s playing a couple different positions offensively – pass protection, run blocking, pass receiving, some plays out of the backfield, some plays on the line of scrimmage. He’s a pretty versatile guy, we’ll see how that unfolds, but he can do a number of different things and that certainly adds to his value. Anytime a player’s got a lot of responsibilities, a lot of jobs like that, there’s a lot of technique, a lot of things to work on and that’s the case for him. There are things that as he gets more experience with, hopefully he’ll do better but he’s a smart kid, he works hard, he learns well, he doesn’t make very many mistakes out there, it’s just he doesn’t have a lot of experience doing some of the things that we’re doing out there and that’s part of his growth."

With the NFL, as with all pro sports, the season is longer than it was in college, and most rookies hit a wall about two-thirds of the way through their first season. But is there a training camp wall too? Belichick said yes.

"Oh yeah, sure. It’s maybe a lower wall but it’s a wall nevertheless. They just get overloaded with everything – schemes, techniques, the grind of training camp, the level of competition. Most rookies were probably one of the top players on their team and now they’re probably not that and in most cases they were probably physically better than most players they competed against and now they’re probably not that, so not being able to push guys around or run past them or just be a better athlete than other players that they competed against last year in college, those days are… probably not here right now for most of `em. They’re looking at a different type of competition where they’re maybe not as fast or not as big or not as strong or certainly not as experienced as what the competition was last year so it’s a big jump and it hink all that’s adding up. Plus the pressure of being at camp, it’s a job, that whole feeling that rookies have that they need to have of is if I’m not playing football and I don’t make this team, what am I going to be doing in 2, 3 weeks and that’s probably not something they were thinking about last year when they were on the gravy train in college."

Practice has been pushed back to 4:30 this afternoon; Belichick alluded to the fact that today could be the team's first day inside the practice bubble, but it has not rained here for a few hours. We'll keep you posted.

shalise

Posted by Shalise Manza Young  at 2:42 PM | Permalink