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FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Rookie offensive tackle Cameron Fleming had a later start than most to the Patriots’ offseason training regimen -- as he was finishing up school. But, coach Bill Belichick has been impressed with Fleming’s ability to catch up to the rest of the players in a short time. “I think Cam [Fleming] has done a real good job for us,” Belichick said. “One of the challenges for him and for us was him not really being here for much of the spring. Just being late in spring because of his commitments to school. We really didn’t have a great feel for him until training camp started. “And he came here in really good condition. He ran well. He dropped some weight; he leaned up. He worked really hard between the beginning of June and the end of July. He was definitely ready to go, had a good camp, performed very well. And caught up to all the things we were doing in a short amount of time. The more time we spent around him, the more impressed we were.” Fleming, a 6-foot-6, 325-pound tackle out of Stanford, was selected by the Patriots in the fourth round (140th overall). In the Patriots’ 30-7 victory over the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday, Fleming played 28 of 67 plays as a tight end, equaling tight end Rob Gronkowski’s workload. “When you draft a guy, I don’t think you draft a tackle to play tight end,” Belichick said. “We didn’t draft [Nate] Solder to play tight end but even in his rookie year he played a lot of that position. Sometimes it just works out that way one way or another depending on your team and a little bit on the player’s skills.” Fleming could be on a similar track as starting left tackle Nate Solder, who was a tight end during his freshman season at Colorado and also played tight end as an extra blocker in his first season with the Patriots. “I think Cam showed us repeatedly in both practice and in preseason games, practices against Philadelphia and Washington, he could earn time on the field,” Belichick said. “Sometimes you sit in there as a staff and say how do we get our best players on the field -- get our best blockers on the field. We knew one way to do it in this case.” Fleming is making a smooth transition to blocking at tight end, which is a bit different from playing tackle. “It’s one guy further away from the ball,” Belichick said. “There’s a lot of different looks a tight end has to see relevant to the outside linebacker, the defensive end, the safety, sometimes the corner on the backside, slot. There’s a lot of configurations back there that are a lot different than what a tackle sees, but he has done a good job of that. Identifying them, recognizing, sorting them out, working in conjunction with either another tight end or the tackle to the inside of him.”
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