« Locker room look | Main | Five to finish »

Bill's take

FOXBOROUGH -- Bill Belichick opened his Saturday press conference with the following statement:

"We’re underway. We have a lot of young guys out there, a lot of new faces and people who we're just starting all over with and that, in a way, is always a good thing. It's a good time of year to do that. I think it's good for all of us to go back and start from scratch and teach from scratch. As you can see, we don't have enough players out there for a full team, so a lot of the things that we’re doing are segmented or they’re in groups. Eventually, of course, that will all get put together in due course, but for right now there’s a lot of teaching going on and trying to get these guys caught up to speed in terms of what we do and how we do it, our terminology and just our general process of how we do a lot of things, not just the x’s and o’s on the field, but just the whole preparation, studying and the whole routine, weights, our offseason program and so forth. There’s a lot of orientation, a lot of teaching going on. So that is where we are. I don't think this is really the time to evaluate what a lot of guys are doing just because it's so new and unfamiliar to a lot of them. We'll give them a little time to settle in here and hopefully we can get them caught up so when they do eventually work with the veterans, they’ll be at least somewhat competitive and have enough understanding that they can have a chance to compete with them. That's where we are here."

EXTRA POINTS: Running back Quinton Smith, an undrafted free agent from Rice, was not present today because he was walking in Rice's graduation. ... Safety Brandon Meriweather said he wouldn't have picked jersey number 38, but that was what was assigned to him. He then added that the player makes the jersey number, and that the jersey number doesn't make the player. Meriweather wore 19 in college. ... Kyle Bissinger, an undrafted free agent from Alabam-Birmingham, worked at both inside and outside linebacker. Bissinger was a defensive end in college.

We'll have one final update a bit later today.