FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Quick-hit thoughts and notes around the New England Patriots and the NFL:

1. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady spent parts of the first week of his suspension staying sharp at his TB12 Sports Therapy Center at Patriot Place, meaning he was still making the daily drive to Foxborough, with his work coming a Hail Mary pass away from the team’s facility. In one of his final news conferences before the suspension, Brady had been tight-lipped on if he would stay local. To this point, he has.

2. Listening to former Patriots assistant to the coaching staff Michael Lombardi on sports radio WEEI’s “Kirk & Callahan Show” this past Friday, I came away feeling like I learned behind-the-scenes insight on the team’s thinking in selecting quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo in the 2014 second round. Lombardi was in the team’s draft room that year.

“I think if you go back to ’13, you take the ’13 [playoff] game against Denver, I’m not sure the team around Tom was very good. But I think Tom, in ’14 and ’15, had played better than he did in ’12 and ’13. That’s rare to do for a quarterback as you get older, but that’s very much the case,” Lombardi, now a Fox Sports analyst, said on the program.

“Whenever you have an older quarterback, especially when you get past 35 -- with any player -- you don’t know how much further it can go. Every year you get away from 35, you’re stealing years because history tells us that quarterbacks don’t last that long. It just doesn’t happen.”

The Patriots’ selection of Garoppolo (the highest QB pick of Belichick’s 17-year tenure) seemed to be made with the mindset that they weren’t expecting Brady’s rebound. They drafted Jacoby Brissett (third round) this year.

Only two other teams, the Browns and Rams, have selected multiple quarterbacks within the first three rounds of the draft over the past three years.

3. Did You Know: After it was learned late Friday that the Patriots would be without tight end Rob Gronkowski for Sunday night’s game at Arizona, the odds moved from them being a six-point underdog to a seven-point ‘dog. The last time they were an underdog by that many points was the 2009 season finale at Houston, which was the game in which receiver Wes Welker tore his ACL in a 34-27 loss. The Patriots' playoff positioning was solidified entering that game.

4a. Cardinals safety Tyrann Mathieu faces the Patriots for the first time in his four-year NFL career, and one never-believed-to-be-told story is how he truly thought he would be playing for Bill Belichick in New England. “They told me they would draft me late in the first round,” Mathieu relayed to ESPN this week. As it turned out, the Patriots ended up trading their late first-round choice in 2013 and selected linebacker Jamie Collins (No. 52) and receiver Aaron Dobson (No. 59) in the picks before Mathieu went No. 69 to the Cardinals. So if Mathieu appears to have a little extra chip on his shoulder Sunday night, that might be why.

4b. I asked Belichick last week about his 2013 pre-draft meeting with Mathieu and he used the word “impressive” while adding that it was obvious how much Mathieu loved football (Mathieu, for his part, said no team grilled him as intensely as the Patriots did). It seemed genuine and a clear reflection of how much Belichick liked him as a prospect, as he touched on his athleticism, physicality and toughness (there were also some off-field issues with Mathieu). From my personal experience, I’d be surprised if anyone from the Patriots told Mathieu they would definitively select him in the first round; that’s not the way it usually works. But they obviously liked him, and he would have made them, like the NFL’s other 31 teams, better.

5. One thing that Brady said this past Thursday during his Westwood One pregame interview that I think got lost a bit was his acknowledgement of how being pulled away from practices for court appearances and legal planning affected him last year. That contributed to his decision to not pursue further legal options in the Deflategate fight this year. “I owe my teammates to be the best that I can be and to have this divided attention that I had at different points last season was something that didn’t really serve me,” he told host Jim Gray. I don’t recall him acknowledging that before.

6. Fashion stuff: Those curious about the “color rush” uniforms that the Patriots and Texans will wear for their Sept. 22 Thursday night game, stay tuned, as I’m told the league is expected to announce those Tuesday.

7. Belichick is known for his thoroughness in accounting for all situations, and along those lines, I wonder if he’s taking an unnecessary risk by not having a quarterback on the 10-man practice squad for the first four games of the regular season during the time Brady serves a suspension. For some league-wide context, there are 12 teams that have just two quarterbacks on their initial 53-man rosters, and of those 12, a total of eight have at least one quarterback on their practice squad for a third layer of depth. The exceptions are the Chargers, Eagles, Patriots and Seahawks.

Number of QBs on initial 53-man roster

Four: 1 (Jets)

Three: 19

Two: 12

8. For those who appreciate the third phase of the game (aka special teams), keep an eye on the Cardinals’ Justin Bethel (No. 28) on Sunday night. He’s basically Arizona's version of the Patriots’ Matthew Slater, who is widely viewed as the NFL's gold standard in the kicking game. A sixth-round draft choice out of Presbyterian in 2012, Bethel has been the NFC’s Pro Bowl special-teamer in each of the past three seasons and has amassed 67 tackles, three blocked field goals, three forced fumbles and two fumble recoveries over his career. Slater told me this week that in his nine NFL seasons, he maybe hasn’t seen as good a special-teams player as Bethel.

9. There was one notable Patriots twist from Seth Wickersham’s ESPN The Magazine profile on Denver Broncos executive vice president John Elway, as it detailed how Elway tried to sell Peyton Manning on a pay cut after the 2014 season. “Do you want to be considered better than Brady?” Elway asked. “Championships will be the tiebreaker.” One wonders how much the reference to Brady swayed Manning’s decision to accept a reduction from $19 million to $14 million.

10. Watch Belichick miked up at practice, via the Patriots All-Access program, and I’m curious if you have the same reaction as me: 64 years old and still energized as ever by the day-to-day grind and process of coaching football.