Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome into Tom Curran's Patriots Talk podcast. We have a great one for you today. It's Thomas Dimitra, former Falcons GM, who of course came up with the New England Patriots. He knows the NFL draft. He knows the ways and means of moving around a draft board, and he knows how the Patriots think pretty much as well as anyone. So we're going to get into the quarterback class, what it takes

to go and break a mold for a player, the trade scenarios, and of course how players are graded

and ranked, all with a Patriots focus coming up right now on Tom Curran's Patriots Talk podcast.

Tom Curran's Patriots Talk Podcast.

Here's our guy, Thomas Dimitrov, former GM of the Man of Falcons, of course, with the Patriots for a long time, made his bones here

and went on to great success. And thank you so much for coming in. I'm sorry I had to make you

turn off those monitors behind you, buddy. He, I'm happy to be here. Yeah, no, I've been delving

into all of this. I have all kinds of, you know, productions going on in the back here. So I know it was disrupting you guys, so I'm glad we're off. We're ready to go.

Here we go. Flying out of the box with a story I did earlier this week that actually went back to 2004,

and I had a long conversation back then with Bill Belichick about stacking the board,

the horizontal board, and the vertical board. And we discussed this earlier this week. This is something

that is not really in the parlance of most draft observers. Talk to me about how important

this is and how much of it's going on right now. Well, look, it's really important. And one thing I think

you understand, and your good friend and our good friend, Scott Keoli and Bill Belichette, worked magically on putting that grade scale together years and years ago.

And a lot of us, interestingly enough, for your listeners, a lot of us who were a part of the Patriot paradigm and moved on, have taken that grading scale.

And we've adjusted it and, you know, for each organization. I mean, it might be in seven, eight to ten organizations right now. And it's interesting in some of those situations, it is even makes it easier when you're trying to hire personnel directors. If they have that in their background, it's an easy move from one organization to another.

And a lot of it was based on the vertical on the horizontal side.

So what Scott and Bill did many years ago when they were putting that together was they

created this idea that, of course, you vertically stacked by position, but the grading scale

also relates to other positions on, you know, on the draft board. So if you take the offensive

draft board, for instance, you know, you have the quarterback position, running back position,

tight end position, and you have grades that across the horizontal spectrum that that relate to each

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