clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

New England Patriots Links 4/30/12 - Dissecting the Draft: Patriots Pick Quality Over Quantity

By Marima
<em>Movin' on up: Patriots first-round pick Chandler Jones is getting off to a very likeable start</em>.
Movin' on up: Patriots first-round pick Chandler Jones is getting off to a very likeable start.

Greg Gabriel (Nat'l Football Post) A look at the AFC East drafts: New England Patriots.

With the Pats playing more 4-man fronts Chandler Jones will be a great addition. Right off the bat he replaces Mark Anderson, who signed with Buffalo. Jones is just beginning to scratch the surface of how good he can be. I’m not as high on Dont’a Hightower as others. I agree he is a very good player but in the tapes I watched he didn’t make as many plays as he should. He may be best at OLB in the Pats scheme. I don’t know much about Tavon Wilson other than he is an athletic safety/corner. I’ll trust Belichick on that one. Jake Bequette is a tough, hardnosed overachiever. He may never start but he can be a good role player.

Bill Belichick addresses the media after the close of the 2012 NFL Draft.

It's a long day but hopefully a productive one. We can close the books here on the 2012 Draft. We started out the day in the fifth round; had an opportunity to move back and we felt like draft three players instead of one so we felt that was a better place for us to be so we did that in the fifth round.

Nate [Ebner] is a guy that is a big, fast safety that has been very productive in the kicking game, relatively inexperienced player that we think has a lot of good football in front of him. Of course, we have some good connections at Ohio State, people that have worked with him that obviously that played a part in it too, just in terms of his overall development and where we think he can be.

And then Alfonzo [Dennard] is a guy that we spent a lot of time on. Obviously the incident affected his draft position but certainly we're aware of it. We researched it, we found out as much as we could about it. Obviously, as an organization we're comfortable making the selection where we did.

[Jeremy] Ebert is a guy that we kind of got onto late; worked him out this past week. He's an impressive guy; does a lot of things well. We feel like he's versatile and be able to compete at that position for us as one of the younger players obviously that we have at that position. We have a lot of experienced guys there, we felt like adding a good, young player like him to that group would be good.

We've been banging away on the free agents now after the draft. We're working our way through that process, but hopefully we'll be able to add some players there that will be able to compete for roster spots and give us depth on the roster. We've been able to find a guy or two there pretty much every year, undrafted guys that have come in and made our team and contributed for us. Hopefully, our efforts there after the draft will be productive in some fashion as they have been in the past. We're working hard at that.

... We'll clean up the free agent stuff today, tonight hopefully and then move on to putting the team together and getting everybody out there, start the real formation of the team working on the field next week and in the coming weeks when the rookies come in.

TEAM TALK

LOCAL LINKS

NATIONAL NEWS

More From Pats Pulpit