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
We're just one of 32 teams in the 2005 season, ... We're all trying to accomplish the same thing. We respect what has been done by everybody, whether it be the Packers, the Patriots, whoever. But it really doesn't mean anything right now. We're just trying to get our team ready to play -- this year.
We were trying to take a little bit of the edge off, give everybody a chance to relax. It's been a good hard week with a lot of concentration. We figured we'd lighten up a little here and be ready to go tomorrow.
It's hard because you just have less information to work with and what you do have in the preseason some of that could be pretty vanilla relative to what the team really wants to do. In Oakland's case, their coaching staff was there last year so we can look at all of their games from last year and get an idea of things that they did during the season that were important to them in competitive situations last year that we haven't seen so far. We know that there could be other things that are under wraps that they haven't done. We just have to be ready to make some adjustments during the game. I think that's the way it always is. There's no question that this is the hardest game.
Every player that dresses for the game, I've told them to be ready to go for 60 minutes just like it's a regular-season game.
Sometimes, maybe some of the guys at that position, because of expectation, are put into situations before they're ready to have success, (and) that affects their confidence and their ability to develop.
I've told everybody to be ready to go. I'm sure that we'll look at some of the players that didn't play as much in the Green Bay game a little bit more against the Giants and try to get the best evaluation that we can as we make our final decisions at the end of the week. I'm sure that the younger players and the players who didn't play as much against Green Bay will play more than the ones who did play quite a bit against Green Bay. Let's put it that way.
It comes back to team defense. I think you have to be careful about trying to stop one guy in this league. There are not too many teams that you play that have only have one player. The Raiders are a team that has, when they're on offense, 11 good ones and you better be ready to stop all of them. Not just one guy.
I think you have to be careful about trying to stop one guy in this league. There's not too many teams that you play that have only one player. The Raiders are a team that has, when they're on offense, 11 good ones and you better be ready to stop all of them.
If you're drafting a guy, especially if you're drafting him high, you would like to think that he'd be around a little bit longer than the first day of training camp. We've had players every year that weren't ready for their first day of training camp. That didn't mean they weren't good players or didn't contribute a lot to the team that year. I don't think that's the final evaluation.
This is a good opportunity for us this week to go up against another good team, a very hot team, and continue to get ourselves ready for the following week's game, whoever that might be against. We're going to approach this as a normal week.
We've always tried to coach and abide by the NFL rules, whatever they are,
When I was out there, I really enjoyed talking to Al,
We're going to do what we think is best. What we did against Oakland may or may not be what we think is best against Carolina. Last year we played Indianapolis in one type of a defense. We played Pittsburgh in another type of a defense. We played Philadelphia in another type of a defense. We're going to do what we think we need to do to try to match up and stop the opponents. I'm not making any promises to anything or anybody about what we're going to do.
We brought 45 guys here. When one man goes down, that's what the other is there for. He steps in.