Bill Belichick
Bill Belichick
William Stephen Belichickis an American football coach, and the long-time head coach of the New England Patriots of the National Football League. Belichick has extensive authority over the Patriots' football operations, effectively making him the General Manager of the team as well. He was previously the head coach of the Cleveland Browns...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth16 April 1952
CityNashville, TN
CountryUnited States of America
When you have the ball as long as we had (against the Jets), I think that is some measure of control. But we'd like to have more rushing yards for the number of attempts. There's no question about that. There were some positive things in the game about our running game. There are certainly a lot of things that we can work on. We'd like to be more consistent and gain a few more yards. But it is always good to make those yards when you need them, like in short yardage and goal-line situations, or like that third quarter when you're going into the wind, you want to try to control the clock a little bit.
We kind of stumbled around there on a few things tonight, ... It's going to catch up to us if we don't watch out. But it's good to win.
There certainly haven't been many times in the last few years where you release a player and say, 'Well, this guy couldn't help us. This guy just couldn't do anything,' ... It's more a case of you have a few spots and you have more people than you do spots. So then you have to make a decision as to where you want your depth. Do you want it on the offensive line, do you want it in the kicking game, do you want it in the secondary, do you want it at tackle, do you want it at receiver, do you want it at quarterback?
I don't know what normal is. You can go back and look at the past few years. There are always going to be changes.
Most of the time you'd think of doing this if you're ahead. You're up by six, or 10, or 11. There've been very few times, if ever, where you take a safety when you're actually behind. But think about it. There's not a lot of great options in that situation. I just figured, if you're down one or three, what's the big difference? You've still got to get at least a field goal. This just made the most sense.
Of course, the offensive line functions very well together. It just really grows on you. The more you watch them, the more in sync they seem to be. There are very few spaces in their plays. Everything is pretty tightly fit together.
We've won a few games here the last five, six weeks and hopefully we can continue to play better.
The last couple of years we've had a lot of guys go in the first round at receiver, mostly bigger receivers, and there has certainly been a trend and a little bit of a stampede to get those kind of guys. It seems like there are fewer of them this year.
Doug had kicked a lot of good ones in practice. We'd done it a few times and he banged it right through there, so he didn't have time to think about it today.
Almost 75 years of football gave him a vast knowledge and reverence historically for the game that very few could match, ... He coached everything, and his ability to teach and interact with people has really come back to me in my lifetime and in the last few days.
There are 11 people out there playing defense. What makes a difference is how those 11 people play. That's what defense is about. It's about team defense. You are always trying to isolate it into one player, one situation or one thing, and it just doesn't work that way.
There are 11 guys on the field, including the coaching staff and everyone else on the sideline,
When you have a football team, everybody has a role on it. And Ro's role, for the most part in the last couple of years, . . . was to get the defense ready. Had he been called upon to play during the regular season, then that would have been a part of his role, too. But, for the most part, it wasn't. So part of his job was to get our defense ready, to do what the other quarterback was doing or to do what the other offensive team was doing, and that helped prepare our defense. In no way can I minimize that.
We've got the same amount of time that Jacksonville has to prepare for the game, so we're on a level field there. We just have to do a better job. You've got to play your best football in January. It's that time of year.