On Monday, with roughly 24 hours before the trade deadline, Bill Belichick laid out his simple approach at this time of the year.
“You look at the players who are not on your roster — whether they’re on your practice squad, whether they’re on some other team’s practice squad or whether they’re not on anybody’s team — and you put together a list of players that, if you had a need arise, would be the players that you’d go to,” Belichick said on a conference call with the media.
“And in conjunction with that, you look at the rosters of the other 31 teams in the league, and based on what you know, other information that you gather, the inactive list every week and the play time, you can start to see which players have a diminished role in another team’s system for whatever those reasons are.
“And a lot of times if a team has a need in an area, and they match that up with another team who’s not making a player active that the team with the depth issue feels could give them depth, then that’s a potential conversation.”
With that in mind, let’s take a look at what’s been cooking around the league for the last few days and how some of that conversation might be related to the Patriots.
First, despite the fact that our guy Greg believes Jimmy Graham would be a great fit in New England, Seattle coach Pete Carroll told Mike Silver that the report from Ian Rapoport, his NFL media teammate, saying Graham could be had was “total (expletive).” We all know how quickly things change when it comes to the deadline, but it’s certainly worth noting Carroll’s strong response to the report.
Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, to me just now: 'We are NOT trading Jimmy Graham. That's total bulls---' @AroundTheNFL @nflnetwork
— Michael Silver (@MikeSilver) October 29, 2017
Hearing several teams trying to get Dion Lewis from the Pats---wont happen.
— Michael Lombardi (@mlombardiNFL) October 30, 2017
One player to keep an eye on before the trade deadline: #Lions TE Eric Ebron. Teams have been calling Detroit to potentially trade for him.
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) October 29, 2017
