New England Patriots’ Bill Belichick happy to be outlier at NFL combine – New England Patriots Blog

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Quick-hit thoughts and notes around the New England Patriots and NFL:

1. Quiet at combine: The NFL scouting combine takes place March 1-7 in Indianapolis, and true to form, Bill Belichick plans to keep a lower media profile.

The Patriots are the only NFL team not scheduled to have either their head coach or a personnel executive answer questions from non-team-based reporters from media headquarters.

The league doesn’t require teams to conduct such interviews, but encourages them to do so. Belichick’s Patriots and Sean Payton’s New Orleans Saints have been the usual holdouts in recent years. But Payton has stepped away from coaching this year, and in turn the Saints are scheduled to have his replacement, Dennis Allen, answer questions from non-team-based reporters.

Belichick as this year’s lone outlier is hardly a surprise. He isn’t one to feed the hype, especially in 2022 with Brian Flores’ lawsuit against the NFL — which includes texts from Belichick — a potential hot topic.

However, there have been times he has played along.

In 2014, Belichick made a surprise appearance inside media headquarters, shared a detailed perspective on how the combine has evolved over his 30-plus years attending, then answered questions about his coaching staff, personnel decisions, and big-picture topics such as the value of the three-cone drill and nuances of player evaluation.

His answers that day provide a roadmap of sorts for where things stand today.

The coaching staff has most of the pieces in place (the current staff has held meetings over the past two weeks), and, as Belichick said in ’14: “We’ll see how it all comes together.”

Specific to personnel decisions, as Belichick said in ’14: “I talked about that at the end of the season, the process that involved, [and]…