bill belichick

Q: So you have to get lined up, you can’t be playing games and trying to disguise?

BB: I’d say that’s pretty accurate. You have to be careful about trying to do too much with him. You better be able to get to what you have, which does mean that a lot of times you have to show what you’re in, in order to match up against their different looks because they create a lot of different formationing and like I said, detaching the tight end, detaching the backs, they use a lot of different personnel groups with the multiple tight ends – all their backs play, all their tight ends play, all their receivers play. They run them in and out of there in a hurry. Then get lined up and get to go, you have to be ready to play when the ball is snapped because he does a very good job of, when the defense, when they miss somebody, he finds them. They get a bunch of plays every week on I would say, defensive mistakes or alignment errors that he recognizes and just gets the ball to whoever it is and then you’re chasing him. That’s a big challenge.

Not sure how much easier it would’ve been to kick a field goal in said monsoon…

The Patriots kick a field goal on fourth-and-goal from the 1-yard line down 10 points in the fourth quarter. This was a very similar decision to Mike Smith’s call from Week 4, when he took a field goal on fourth-and-1 from the 6-yard line against the Patriots that turned a 10-point game into a seven-point one. Here, Bill Belichick faced fourth-and-goal from the 1-yard line against the Bengals, and he made the same call: kick a field goal and go down seven. Some of the facts regarding those two decisions are the same. Others affect the choices at hand. The biggest difference was that Belichick made his call with 6:30 left in the game, while Smith’s came with 3:00 left. With the extra time, Belichick’s team would theoretically have more time to move the ball down the field and produce the extra yardage it needed on the subsequent drive for the touchdown, which seems to make the early field goal a better option. On the other hand, if Smith went for it and failed last week down 10 points, his game was over. Belichick could have gone for it here, failed, and still had a shot at scoring on two more possessions to win the game. That’s a friendlier fallback plan in the case of failure. In a contest where yards and points were harder to come by, Belichick had to know that it would be harder to score a touchdown on any future possession than it would be from the 1-yard line, even with Cincinnati’s great defense. And, of course, going for it and succeeding on this possession was Belichick’s best shot at actually winning the game over the next two drives; a field goal and a touchdown would only take him and the Patriots to overtime. What he might not have known is that the skies were about to open up. New England kicked the field goal and eventually got the ball back on Cincinnati’s 44-yard line after a fumble with 3:26 left, but by then, monsoon-like conditions had taken over in Cincinnati. The weather was so bad that Tom Brady completed only one of his nine subsequent passes the rest of the way, and the Patriots never seriously threatened to tie. I can’t fault Belichick for failing to prepare for the incoming storm, but his conservative call to kick from the 1-yard line really hurt his team’s chances of winning the game in any weather.

Q: Have you slid defensive ends over to defensive tackle for a few years now, or when is the first time you saw that?

BB: As far back as I can remember. In Cleveland we did it with Rob Burnett. He probably had more production inside than he did outside, and he had a lot of production outside too. So how far is that? 20 years ago? We’ve done it with plenty of people around here. When you’re in a 3-4 defense, you usually take your defensive ends and move them inside. If you’re in a 4-3 defense, a lot of times you just get your better pass rushers out there on the field. If one of your outside guys can move inside and be productive in there, then I think you see a lot of teams of that. I don’t think it’s anything that’s revolutionary or that big a deal to us or any other teams in the league. But like I said, I can remember doing that back in Cleveland with Rob Burnett. Those guys can do a good job sometimes moving inside on guards with their quickness and their pass rush skills, when they don’t really have to play the run on a lot of those situations. They can just rush and you can get a third guy in there, that’s really three ends. It gives you better speed, better athleticism, better pass rushers on the field – if that’s the situation.

As close as we’ll ever get to a BB film session…