FOXBORO -- Using players at different spots is hardly a new concept for the Patriots. After all, this was a franchise that gave us linebacker Mike Vrabel as a part-time tight end in goal-line packages, wide receiver Troy Brown as a nickel corner and defensive lineman Richard Seymour at fullback.

So the idea of making tackle Thomas Welch a tight end and moving linebacker Dane Fletcher to fullback isn’t anything new for a Bill Belichick-coached team. The Patriots utilized Welch as a tight end for a series of snaps on Sunday against the Raiders, and have put Fletcher, a linebacker, at fullback on several occasions over the course of the first four games.

When it comes to Fletcher, he was originally asked to become the de facto goal-line fullback sometime shortly before the regular-season opener against Miami, and played a pair of snaps there in the opener. (Tom Brady looked his way on Fletcher’s second play from scrimmage as a fullback -- on a third-and-goal from the two, Brady targeted him on a play-action pass to the right flat, but the Dolphins had it covered perfectly.)

Since then, he hasn’t had any more scoring opportunities, but the 25-year-old out of Montana State has lined up there on several other occasions, including last Sunday against the Raiders where he cleared the way for a BenJarvus Green-Ellis touchdown.

Fletcher said his experience level at fullback was “slim to none” at the start of the season, so when it comes to the position, he likes to keep it simple.

“They tell me to go run my face into some people, I’ll do it,” he said with a laugh. “I picked it up pretty quickly. I don’t have as many things as [Tom] Brady has going on in his head. Whatever they tell me to do, I’ll just go do that.”

Belichick said the 6-foot-2, 244-pound Fletcher has a good feel for the fullback position, as it requires the same field vision you look for in a linebacker.

“Linebackers, you kind of have to see the hole, like a [running] back does,” Belichick said. “You don’t want to fill where your guys are -- you want to fill where they’re not and fill in the space, and that’s the same space that running back’s seeing.

“That’s sort of the same thing a linebacker does, is to try to see those openings and know that’s where you fit into them because your linemen have the other areas occupied,” Belichick added. “It’s not the same, but if you see what I’m saying, there’s some carryover there. And Dane has adapted to that pretty well. He kind of has a good feel for it because it is similar spacing to what a linebacker has to look at.”

“They tell you a certain thing, they want you to run a certain direction, fill a hole and hit somebody on the way,” Fletcher said. “In a lot of the same sense, it’s like linebacker. So far, I’ve been doing all right at it.”

Don’t look for any Vrabel comparisons down the road, however. Belichick said Monday that when the former New England linebacker was a part of goal-line packages, Vrabel “might have had the best hands on the team in that group when he was on the field.”

“I’m saying, when Mike was in the goal-line offense, of all the players that were on the field, he probably had the best hands of anybody – the other tight ends, the [running] back, anybody we put out there,” Belichick said of Vrabel, who caught 10 touchdowns over the course of his career.

“Mike had pretty good hands. He could catch. Maybe not Vince [Wilfork] hands, but pretty good hands.”

Fletcher recalled watching Vrabel catch touchdown passes “when he was a kid.”

“If I could fit into that kind of a guy he was, that’d be great,” Fletcher said.

As for Welch, he has actually played some tight end before -- he was originally recruited to Vanderbilt as a tight end before switching to offensive line, part of a unique position progression that went from quarterback in high school to tackle in college.

“He hurt his shoulder and couldn’t throw, so they moved him to tight end in high school,” Belichick said of the 24-year-old Welch, who was a seventh round pick of the Patriots out of Vandy in 2010. “Vanderbilt recruited him as a tight end and he grew into a tackle. [But] he’s played at least one year of tight end.

With Aaron Hernandez on the shelf because of a knee injury, the Patriots were lacking tight end depth, and so the 6-foot-7, 310-pound tackle was on the field for several snaps as a tight end in New England’s 31-19 win over the Raiders on Sunday.

“I guess they just needed someone else to come in because obviously we have some people down. They told me to be ready, and I was, and that’s what happened,” Welch said, “I thought I did all right. Obviously, there’s some room for improvement, always. But for my first time playing tight end, I thought I did OK.”

According to ESPN Boston, Welch was on the field as a pass-eligible tight end on 24 snaps. And while he didn’t appear to run any routes, he played a role in helping the New England ground game account for a season-high 183 rushing yards.

“I had to dig in the memory bank a little bit to remember how to go in motion and things like that,” he said with a smile. “But overall, it was good.”