Report: Bill Belichick Reveals How He Scouts Players in Other Systems

New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick made a conference call with reporters the day after the second preseason game.

Bill Belichick answered a bunch of questions about the Pats. Although he followed the same pattern when responding to questions, he sure gave a nice explanation of the player evaluation. He focused more on the attempts to discern value in players who are probably in the right system.

New England wasn’t always readily understandable to new players. There’s a specific scheme here – ‘buy low, sell high.’ We noticed this in every part of Belichick’s career. There were all the low-price free agents like Mike Vrabel and undervalued draft picks like Marcus Cannon. What about Rob Gronkowski?

Reporters wanted to know about his scouting of players in other systems.

“It happens all the time. It happens every year. For whatever reason, players are in different systems and you look at it and you feel like in your system it might be a little better fit than where he was somewhere else,” Belichick said.

“That’s not a criticism of anywhere else, or anything else. I’m sure other teams look at some of our players and think the same way. It’s the same thing in the draft. So, yeah, I think it’s very common to see another player in another system and you can picture him in your system and you can maybe see a little more of a productive player than you see somewhere else. I think that’s fairly common with every team I’ve ever been on.”

He may be right pretty often, and there’s always room for mistakes.

“That area is a very inexact science. Until you actually get them in the system, it’s a little bit of a projection. There are hits and there are misses. I think that’s true with every team. I haven’t seen a team yet that’s hit on all of them,” the head coach said.

Belichick is right. You never know if a player may turn bad in your team.