After five seasons, a trend becomes a trait and this draft season we all saw one of the traits Falcons general manager Thomas Dimitroff looks for in a potential draft pick.
It's not a guarantee, but since he took office in 2008, Dimitroff has focused on players who were team captains during their time in college.
AtlantaFalcons.com pointed to this prior to the draft, sharing that 17 of the 38 players Dimitroff has drafted since '08 were team captains.
The day after the first round of the draft, Jay Adams reminded us all that Atlanta's first-round pick, Desmond Trufant, made the number of drafted team captains 18.
As the draft continued, the trend-turned-trait continued as well.
Of the eight players Atlanta drafted in last month's draft, six were team captains in college. Joining Trufant was second-round pick Robert Alford, fourth-round pick Malliciah Goodman and seventh rounders Kemal Ishmael, Zeke Motta and Sean Renfree.
The only two that weren't captains during college were tight end Levine Toilolo and defensive end Stansly Maponga.
But even Mopanga and Toilolo fell into another category that Dimitroff seems to like to draft from: seniors.
In Dimitroff's 38 previous picks, 33 of them were college seniors and that didn't change this year. All eight of his picks were seniors, bringing that number to 41 seniors in 46 picks.
In one interesting twist, each of Dimitroff's first-round picks (four in five years) were team captains and seniors as well.
