FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Veteran defensive end Chris Long made significant contributions to the New England Patriots' Super Bowl LI championship, and now he’s looking to go back to back in his first season with the Philadelphia Eagles.

When Long departed New England as a free agent in the offseason, he said he was looking for a different scheme fit. On Wednesday, Patriots coach Bill Belichick said he understood why.

“Chris has a lot of good skills, but his overall skill set and experience is definitely more in the system that he’s in than it was in our system,” Belichick said, noting that the Eagles’ 4-3 defense is similar to what Long had played in the first eight seasons of his career with the Rams.

“He did a great job for us. There was no better teammate or guy that tried to embrace the program than Chris, but in the end he probably has a better fit there for his skills and for this point in his career than maybe we had for him. I understand that. He probably made a good decision.”

Yet Belichick sounded as though he still would have been happy to have the 32-year-old Long.

“Not that it wouldn’t have worked out here. I’m not saying that or maybe it couldn’t have worked out here. I don’t know,” Belichick said. “It certainly has worked out well for him there, just like it worked out well for him here last year.

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“I’d say that’s one of the benefits of free agency; it gives players opportunities and teams to find the right guy for the right situation, put guys on your roster that you need or if a team has an excess of players at a certain position, it gives those players an opportunity to go somewhere where there’s a better opportunity for them.

“We saw that when I was with the Giants. We had a lot of depth at linebacker. We had guys that didn’t play at linebacker because of the players ahead of them, not because they weren’t good players, that had there been free agency they probably would’ve played somewhere else. That’s one of the reasons why free agency was talked about and advocated, and I think that’s one of the benefits of free agency. It’s worked well for players like that to give them options. If the team and the player make the right choice then it works out well.”

Long had explained his thinking on The MMQB Podcast in March, when asked why he chose New England in 2016 and why he decided to depart after one season.

“I knew I wanted to go and have a chance to win a ring and see what that felt like to win. I want to continue to win in the league. You have to work really hard no matter what team you’re on to win. There’s no guarantee wherever you are that you’re going to win; I just try to go to the place that gave me the best opportunity. I said I would do anything to make that possible and to help.

“Most of the year I played inside, played on the right side. I had played on the left side my whole career. And it’s not a big deal, but if I’m going to keep playing at my age, I still have a fire burning to be the type of player I want to be. I think at my age, playing 3-technique, doing those things, I’m happy to do all the dirty-work things, but eventually if I’m going to be me and get back to where I was for a year or two even, I had to go elsewhere.

“I don’t know if they would have wanted me back or not, but it was one of those things where it was like, ‘I’m not going to waste’ -- I have too much respect for that organization to waste their time, and go back and forth in negotiations, or not tell them that I was planning on moving on. It wasn’t a big deal that I was moving on for them. They’ll be just fine. But for me, as a man, I just think I would hate to string them along even if I was just depth at a position, or just a piece of the puzzle.

“That’s kind of why I said I needed to move on. If I’m going to keep playing football, I’m not going to do certain things that I was doing there. I was happy to do them [in 2016], but I’m a year older, and if I want to keep playing, I have to do certain things differently.”