Nick Caserio said the Patriots are ‘comfortable’ with their current tight end group
Caserio also discussed his thoughts on the Patriots' first-round pick, N'Keal Harry, and the team's newest quarterback.
The Patriots made 10 draft picks over the course of the three-day NFL Draft in Nashville, Tennessee.
Bill Belichick’s team did not utilize any of those picks on a tight end in the wake of Rob Gronkowski’s retirement, leaving Nashville without adding to a depth chart consisting of newcomer Austin Sefarian-Jenkins, Jacob Hollister, Stephen Anderson, Matt LaCosse, and Ryan Izzo.
If the Patriots still hold concerns about life without Gronk at tight end, director of player personnel Nick Caserio won’t admit it.
“We’re comfortable with the players on our team otherwise they wouldn’t be here,” Caserio said when asked if he was comfortable with the Patriots’ current tight end group.
When the Patriots played their cards in this year’s draft, tight ends just weren’t in their hand. The two top players at the position, T.J. Hockenson and Noah Fant, were picked eighth and 20th overall, respectively. The Pats traded up in round two and selected cornerback Joejuan Williams ahead of the next two tight ends drafted. So what did the team see that kept them away from drafting at that position?
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“I mean, look, we work across the board and we try to rank the players accordingly,” Caserio said. “I mean, were there opportunities for us there? I mean, possibly, so it’s always relative to what are your other options, what else are you looking at?”
Here’s what else Caserio said after all three days in the 2019 NFL Draft.
On wide receiver N’Keal Harry, the team’s first-round pick
The Patriots looked at a wide receiver in the first round for the first time since the team picked Terry Glenn seventh overall in 1996. N’Keal Harry, the 6-foot-2, 228-pound receiver from Arizona State, broke the trend.
If the Patriots believe they unearthed an “x-factor” within Harry that other teams had not, Caserio’s lips largely remained sealed. He said the team does not consider what they have done in the past when making draft choices and stated the team picked the player they believed made the most sense when asked what made him say Harry is the right choice.
“Our whole philosophy is just to try to pick good football players regardless of where they come from, how they get here, what position that they play,” Caserio told reporters after the first round Thursday. “That’s what we care about. It doesn’t really matter the position that they play. You just try to pick good players, however they get on your team, and just put them in a position where they have a chance to be competitive with the other players that are here. Ultimately, that’s what we’re most concerned about.”
Caserio did reveal enough of the Patriots’ draft operations to concede that the team saw value in Harry’s ability to make catches in tight windows and gain yards after the catch.
“He’s a strong guy,” Caserio said. “He’s hard to tackle. He actually has a little bit of ability to just make people miss. It’s one of the things that he’s been productive doing. You get the ball in his hands and he’s been able to make some yards. We’ll see if that translates over to us here when we get him.”
On selecting a quarterback
Though Jarrett Stidham was the Patriots’ seventh of 10 picks in this draft, the team’s newest quarterback is sure to spark buzz among Patriots fans as he begins competing with Brian Hoyer and Danny Etling for the top backup role to Tom Brady.
“He’s a pretty productive player,” Caserio said of the Patriots’ choice at 133rd overall. “The system is probably a little bit different relative to what he’s going to play in offensively here, but he’s a really smart kid. We had a number of interactions with him along the way. He’s a smart player who takes care of the football with pretty good arm strength. He’s fairly athletic, though not a running quarterback but he has decent movement skills, so I’m sure he’ll be competitive with the rest of the players that we have at the position.”
One reporter noted that Stidham told reporters he met with Caserio himself one-on-one before his Pro Day workout “for about an hour and a half.” When Caserio was asked how much that meeting played into the decision to draft Stidham, he gave a classic Patriot Way answer: it’s all part of the process.
“Everything goes into it,” Caserio said. “I mean, everything goes into it, so it’s just part of our process that we go through. But he’s a smart kid, pretty mature and picks things up well. So, we’ll see how it goes. Like I said, he’s going to transition into a system that’s a little bit different in terms of play calling and some of the other things he’s going to be asked to do here. He’s an impressive kid. He’s very mature, so we’ll see how it goes.”
