Bedard: Sounds like Antonio Brown is a go for Sunday but the question is, how much?

FOXBOROUGH — Bill Belichick was asked Friday about the availability for Antonio Brown for Sunday's game against the Dolphins and the initial responses were typical Belichick.

“We’ll do what’s best for the team," Belichick said.

“We’ll determine that. I’m not going to hand out a copy of the gameplan here," he said. "We'll do what we think is best for the team."

But later, when I asked Belichick about assimilating a player into an offense without disrupting the overall flow — is by personnel packages, or a package of individual plays — the coach was a little bit more forthcoming.

"That's the question. That's the question we're asking ourselves, too," Belichick said. "So you go through the week like we've done, doing different things. Now as we get to Friday, Saturday, we'll decide what things we feel comfortable with. We may eliminate some of the things we've done and concentrate on a certain group, whether that's five plays, 20 plays, I don't know; we'll have to decide that. But, yeah, certainly you don't want any new player, whether that be a tackle, receiver, whatever the guy is, make a mistake, miss a block, making a route adjustment that's not the right one and then turning the ball over, having a big play against you.

"Again, you can't cover all the situations, especially against a team like Miami that we know will do some different things ... they'll put together some things we're not working on, we know that, and they'll come up. If the player doesn't have any experience with them then it would be hard to ask him to do the right thing. You have to try to balance what you ask a player to do with what you think is going to happen. Sometimes that works out but ... Over the course of time, week after week after week, it will build and get better. We'll have better execution, better confidence. That goes for any new player.

"But which plays, how many? That's a good question."

So it sounds like Brown will play. But how much? Judging off recent history, you're looking at about 15-20 plays for players from different offenses.

Josh Gordon played 18 snaps in his first two games after coming over from the Browns last season In his first game, he had two targets and two receptions for 32 yards. In the second game, Gordon was targeted four times with two catches for 50 yards and a touchdown.

In 2017, Phillip Dorsett played 18 snaps in Week 1 after being traded for around cutdowns but didn't catch a pass and had one target.

Michael Floyd played 17 snaps in his 2016 debut. He had one catch for 6 yards on two targets.

In 2015, Keshawn Martin played 36 snaps after coming over from the same offensive system in Houston and produced three catches on three targets for 33 yards and a touchdown.

Belichick was asked about Brown's readiness in the offense.

"A long way to go, obviously," Belichick said. "He's not familiar with our offense, the systems he's been in have been quite different. Jon (Gruden) does the west coast offense, there's very little carryover from their system to our system. It's not bad or good, we've just had other players and there's very little carryover. And similar thing in Pittsburgh. He's working hard to pick it up and we're working hard to get it to him. ... It's too much ground to make up in a few days but we do the best we can and see how it goes.

"Antonio's worked hard. I think all the players we've brought in the past two weeks have all put in a hard effort to pick things up. He certainly falls in there."