BB must believe in him...good enough for me.
From BB himself
On QBs
According to what several professional evaluators have told The Athletic’s Jeff Howe, Jarrett Stidham is better than Love, “and it’s not even close”. That’s apparently how the Patriots feel as well. Add that to fact that Brian Hoyer is back in New England in a system he already knows, and you see why Belichick and Nick Caserio didn’t feel compelled to draft a quarterback for the sake of drafting a quarterback.
“I like both those players,” Belichick said of Stidham and Hoyer. “We’ve had Brian a couple times. I think he certainly gives us a very solid level of play. We have a lot of confidence in him. And Jarrett had a good year last year. He improved a lot. We’ll see where that takes him. Yeah, I have confidence in both players.
“We could talk about that for a long time. But the bottom line is that we’re evaluating that position along with all the other ones,” Belichick said Saturday. “If we feel like we find the right situation, we’ll certainly draft them. We’ve drafted them in multiple years, multiple points in the draft. Didn’t work out last three days. That wasn’t by design. It could have, but it didn’t. Again, there are multiple ways to build your team. We’ll see whether or not we get word of another that comes up at a different point in time. I don’t know. We just tried to do the best we could with what we had this weekend. That’s what we did. We’ll see where it goes.”
The Patriots did reportedly sign quarterback J’Mar Smith out of Louisiana Tech in the rookie free agent period that opened immediately after the draft closed Saturday afternoon.
Drafting a QB "didn’t work out last three days. That wasn’t by design. It could have, but it didn’t." The bottom line to me is that BB likes what he's seen from Stidham and expects him to continue to develop. If his development pace slows or when Stidham reaches his ceiling, if that's not high enough, then BB will spend capital to go after another guy. For now, BB is happy with Stidham's development.
On WRs
“We’ll see how all that goes. I’m sure all our young players will improve in year two,” Belichick told me Saturday night. “(We) got a first-round pick on N’Keal last year, (used a 2020) second round pick on Sanu. That was really off this draft. Obviously, (we) have Julian and a number of other young players. I think that will be a very good group. There’s a lot of different ways and times to build your team. The draft is one of them. As I mentioned, whether it’s Sanu or free agents signing like Byrd, whatever the case might be, there’s multiple ways to build your roster, and this is one of them.”
BB alluded to Sanu's lost year in 2019 when he played with an ankle injury most of the year. "...that's really off this year". Iow, BB is expecting better things from Sanu this year and he's also expecting a big jump from all the rooks last year going into year 2. Harry, Olszewski, Meyers and Adeboyejo have been given their offseason assignments; grading starts in TC on a curve to begin but quickly becomes pass-fail as other options become available at cutdowns.
