Any time Duron Harmon used to have a question in a positional meeting about why his cornerback teammates had done this or failed to do that, he had to rise from his chair in New England’s safeties room, walk down the hall and knock on a door.

Nowadays, after seven years of strolling the halls of Gillette Stadium, Harmon stays in his chair, turns his head and simply asks.

Ahead of their 2019 campaign, the Patriots’ defensive backs have joined forces inside the team’s facility just as they do on the field. Bill Belichick has arranged for the cornerbacks and safeties to meet as a single position group for the first time since at least 2013. On the surface, the change is yawn-worthy.

Corners and safeties both fall under the larger defensive back umbrella. Their jobs, both individually and collectively, can be boiled down to a single task: Cover.

But naturally in New England, where pre-snap disguises, post-snap coverages, checks, assignments and techniques all change week to week, life is a bit more complicated. So meeting together, the defensive backs say, now helps solve those complications.

Have you bought your 2019 Patriots tickets yet? Shop here for the best deals on tickets: StubHub, SeatGeek, Ticketmaster

“I like it. It helps out a lot hearing the safeties talk about stuff we don’t usually hear," cornerback Stephon Gilmore told MassLive. "It’s like I know why they call Down Right (coverage) or Sky Right and different stuff they say. It’s good to be in the same room and learning from each other because we all gotta be on one string back there.”

Added Harmon: “Guys are spending so much time together watching film together, a play comes up on the screen where there might be some confusion, but it’s not like the coaches are telling us what to do. It’s the veterans in the room telling us, ‘OK, we need to do this. We need to do that. And when I’m doing this, this is what I’m thinking.’”

In retrospect, Belichick left a few clues this offseason that he had rearranged the office furniture.

Back in April, New England’s pre-draft media guide initially listed Steve Belichick as the team’s new cornerbacks coach, a move later described as a clerical error. He did remain with the safeties, where he’s coached the last three years, but also quietly added a second title of secondary coach. Simultaneously, staff underling Mike Pellegrino, 25, was promoted to lead the cornerbacks.

Combining their rooms has now allowed the veteran Belichick to offset Pellegrino’s inexperience as a lead assistant. Cornerback Jonathan Jones describes their approach in meetings as cooperative; both with one another and the attending players.

“It’s opened up the communication," Jones said. "The back end is one group, and we’ve all got to see things on the same page. Now we talk it out amongst ourselves and figure it out together.”

The move has also pooled the players’ experience, which last season proved vital to the defense’s success. Without the defensive backs’ ability to disguise, execute and communicate changes — and ultimately stretchi New England’s playbook to unprecedented lengths — the Patriots may have fallen short of the Super Bowl. Once they arrived, it was the secondary that founded perhaps the greatest defensive performance in the game’s history.

If anyone outside New England understands how communication acts as the lifeblood of the Patriots’ system, it’s the opposing coach who chirped at them Wednesday. Titans headman Mike Vrabel spent eight years playing for Bill Belichick and was lauded as one of the team’s smartest players. This week in joint practices, Vrabel watches the secondary drip with talent, and the camaraderie build first hand.

“I think the greater comfort level you have in the guy next to you always can help. Knowing what he’s doing, the eye contact, the hand signals, all those types of things and being able to work in unison and disguise (coverages) and one guy moving one way and somebody else moving another," Vrabel said.

“Or the calls when the receivers are bunched up or stacked up, I think that’s always critical.”

Last season, Vrabel’s offense forced the Patriots into a constant state of adjustment and communication during 34-10 beatdown in Tennessee. The Titans understood New England’s coverage rules against bunch and stack looks and broke them. Both of Tennessee’s passing touchdowns that afternoon were scored from bunch sets.

This circles back to the chief idea driving the Patriots’ meetings change: fostering a self-sustaining culture of football flexibility and savvy capable of ironing out any such offensive wrinkle.

A room with veteran safeties like Harmon, Devin McCourty and Patrick Chung can enact adjustments mid-drive to halt a backwards march into the end zone; where cornerbacks like Gilmore and Jones can gesture quietly to check out of a troublesome coverage; where defensive backs are not divided as corners or safeties, but unified as a secondary performing silent, shutdown symphonies on Sundays.

“It’s something that you can’t just build overnight. It’s something where you gotta build with repetition, other guys knowing where everybody’s going to be in the defense, on the snap or pre-snap. There’s so much that goes into that, but we’re building that," Harmon said.

"And that’s what happens when you have a veteran secondary. You’re able to build that type of trust and go to a new level.”