“I think that’s really going to be a key part of this whole draft, I think, when we look back on it in a couple years and evaluate it.

It will probably come down to which teams are able to evaluate those front seven positions,” Belichick said. “I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of those players taken high, whether they be defensive linemen or defensive ends/outside linebackers or outside linebackers/defensive ends, however you want to look at it. The teams that are able to come out with the impact players in that group relative to the teams that take players and they aren’t able to contribute for them has a lot to do with who’s able to gain the most out of this draft so that will be an interesting part of it.

“I think that’s just kind of the trend in college football these days. You don’t see a lot of true linebackers at the end of the line on their feet. Most of them play with their hand down and you have to make that decision with the Robert Quinns and the Justin Houstons of the world and all those guys … how well you think they can play on their feet or how much you want to play them down? We dealt with that last year when we drafted Jermaine Cunningham but when you look through the league just about everybody’s got those players and last year it was like Koa Misi down in Miami … you just have to project how well those guys are going to be able to play on their feet or how much you want to just leave them down and treat them pretty much as defensive ends even though you have a 3-4 base defense. Those are tough evaluations but they’re there every year.”