Glenn Ordway: It's time, as I promised you at the beginning of the program today, for our first installment of Patriots Monday, and that means that Bill Belichick joins us as he does each and every Monday. Hey, Bill. How are you?
Bill Belichick: Good, Glenn. How are you doing?
GO: We're doing great.
BB: Steve, were you talking about the Tampa Super Bowl there?
Steve DeOssie: Yes, I was. Talking about…
BB: That brings back some fond memories.
SD: It sure does.
BB: 'Wide right.'
SD: 'Wide right.' Exactly right. You told us to pack a bag in New York and they'd bring our suitcases down to Tampa, and everybody was like 'Oh, okay. We can do that.' Everything arrived on time.
BB: How about when we got to the hotel…
SD: Yep.
BB: …and the 49ers, all the administration people were moving the stuff out of the conference rooms that they had already taken over.
SD: They'd moved down their office furniture before the game. Because remember, they'd won two in a row.
Pete Sheppard: And poor Fred.
SD: That's right, Fred was on that San Francisco team.
GO: Fred was moving the furniture.
[Laughter]
SD: They'd won two in a row and they were supposed to three-peat, if I remember.
BB: They had all their FAX machines and all their office books…the whole office thing was all set up.
GO: You know, Bill, those teams never learn. They plan those parades and stuff like that. That stuff just doesn't work.
BB: It was great helping them move their stuff out of there.
[Laughter]
SD: It was such a nice bonus, too. We got there at about four-thirty in the morning.
BB: That's right.
GO: Bad news, Bill. Fred is not here today. Paul Perillo is here instead.
BB: Hey, Paul. How's it going?
Paul Perillo: Excellent, Bill.
GO: We don't know what the story is with Fred.
[Laughter and crosstalk]
GO: All right, before we look back at Friday night, how different is it going forward? I know we always say that – fans, media – the third preseason game is the most important. I know today you talked about the transition. How different is it suddenly – gameplanning and things like that – when you go from preseason Game 2 to preseason Game 3?
BB: Oh, I think it's just a step. It's like walking up a flight of stairs and it's another step. I don't think it's going up two floors or anything. It's just taking another step. We kind of transition into a little bit of a regular season program a little bit more in terms of gameplan, but it's not like a regular season game by any stretch of the imagination. We just try to tighten a few things up. We have in more plays and more situational things than we had in last week, or two weeks ago when we went down to Tampa. So we're a little more prepared for some of those things. We've talked about them and coached them more, so our overall coaching operation's a little bit smoother with the play-calling and the communication to the press box and adjustments and stuff like that. It's just another step. I don't want to make too much out of it. It's moving toward opening day and being ready for the 16-game regular season schedule. You know the problem when you get to opening day is that you don't have any time to just kind of generically work on stuff, because you're always getting ready for the next opponent, until you get to the bye week. So you kind of have to have everything in place that you need by that time, because once you get to the Jets week, you're game-planning. Then the next week you're game-planning for San Diego and you don't have time to catch up on some of that general stuff like two-minute situations, and kicking situations that are one or two times a season in frequency, and stuff like that.
GO: The reason I bring it up is, I've heard for so many years that Game 3 of the preseason is the real one. There's almost like a backtrack for Game 4 to protect a lot of your starting players. Do you not buy into that at all?
BB: Yeah, I wouldn't put it that way. I would say that when you come to those last two preseason games, you still have 75 players on your roster. I think you probably play one group of players a little more in the third game and then play the other group of players a little bit more in the fourth game, as opposed to trying to split it up like we do in the second game. I would just look at it more that way. You really want some of your players to come in at halftime, to go through the whole halftime procedure, to talk about adjustments and come back and warmup again and go back out and play another however many plays – 15, 20, 25 plays – in the third quarter, or start for the fourth, whatever you decide to do. And so you've really kind of taken everybody as much through the process of a normal game as possible. And then do it the same way the next week with a different group of people. Play them about three quarters of the game, where you're building up their stamina and their conditioning, and mentally having to think about all those situations throughout the entire duration of the game. That's kind of how I look at it. You just can't get all that by splitting it in half. I just don't think you get enough. And then you can't see everybody if you give one group a little longer playing-time than the other.
SD: You've got a fairly veteran team. What does a young guy have to do in the preseason games to catch a coach's eye and make the team? Is it possible at this point, four weeks into camp, for a guy to make an impression that all of a sudden says 'OK, he belongs on this team'?
BB: Really, the players that are here have all been improving over the course of camp. If they hadn't, then we probably would move on to somebody else. So it's just a question of the rate of improvement. A lot of times a guy goes out there and doesn't play very well in the first preseason game, but then in the second game starts to make a little bit of a move because he's got more confidence and he understands it better. And then a lot of times in that third game and fourth game you'll really see a big jump in his play because he has a much better understanding and he's seen the live bullets and he's able to play better. It's just hard to predict how that's going to go. But I would just say looking back at our team, we've had guys every year, from Pierre Woods and Mike Wright and Randall Gay and Eric Alexander, guys like that that were undrafted players, as well as some late-round draft choices like Le Kevin [Smith] was a seventh-round pick, Matt Cassel was a seventh-round pick, Patrick Pass was a seventh-round pick, guys like that that made our team. I'm sure that when we drafted them or when we signed them nobody thought very much about them – Lonie Paxton – but through the course of training camp and the preseason games they were able to establish a role for themselves on the team and then go on and develop it from there. I think that opportunity is there for the players who are still on this team. Absolutely.
PP: Since I'm replacing Fred, I thought I'd come up with a couple of Fred-questions for you.
[Laughter]
BB: I appreciate that, Paul.
[Laughter and crosstalk]
PP: Like, when did you realize you were such a great coach? How come the referees are always out to screw us?
[Laughter]
GO: This is no lie, Bill. I got two phone calls from Fred during the game the other day saying, 'The officials are screwing us. They're all over [Tom] Brady.' I did get two of those during the game.
PP: No, in all seriousness, Bill. I was talking to Steve about this when I first got here. John Lynch, in Denver, had some comments about Dallas and about the amount of blitzing they did in the preseason. He was upset about it, saying it kind of went against the code of ethics or whatever. Is there such a thing in the preseason? I noticed both of you guys, you and Jeff [Fisher] the other night, I thought, were going at each other's quarterbacks pretty good. I would imagine that you don't really buy into that, but what are your thoughts on this whole code of ethics in the preseason?
BB: Well no, I don't think that exists. It's just a competitive situation. You're trying to get your team ready and somebody else is trying to get their team ready, and you have to do what you need to do to get that team ready. Sometimes that involves playing certain players or whatever, but really, it was part of the Tennessee gameplan. We did exactly the same thing in this game that we did in our last game with them in the regular season. We did use a lot of five-man rush in that game; we used a lot of five-man rush on Friday night to try to keep Vince Young in the pocket. And then when he left the game at halftime, then in the second half we played very little five-man rush because we really weren't worried too much about [Kerry] Collins running around back there. When you're playing against a quarterback like that, we felt we just needed to let our players do the types of things they would do against a mobile quarterback, like a Vince Young. We felt like if we can kind of contain Young, then we'd probably be able to contain most everybody else. There are not too many guys that are more mobile than him. So what we did was the same thing that we…and on like the hit by [Rodney] Harrison, that was a four-man rush. Harrison came instead of one of the linebackers. It was just kind of like a switch-call for us and really wasn't any big deal, but the back, or somebody, missed him. I don't know if Jeff said anything about it. I can't imagine that he did…
Hosts: No, no.
PP: No, he didn't say anything.
BB: Honestly, we did the exact same thing we did in the regular season game. It was pretty basic – for the most part we just blitzed the two outside linebackers and had a five-man rush.
PS: I always take the positives out of most of these games, even the preseason…
[Laughter]
PS: …I don't care about the score. But one thing I was most impressed with in the game was Rodney Harrison's coverage ability. I was a little worried about that going into the preseason, but he looked like he hasn't missed much of a step here…first couple of weeks.
BB: Rodney's had a real good camp. Yeah, he's had an excellent camp. Guys like Rodney and Junior [Seau] and, even though it was only a day out there with [Vinny] Testaverde, you wouldn't know their age based on their energy and enthusiasm on the playing field. And I don't mean just verbal enthusiasm, I mean they're running around and how quick they are and how athletic they look. For their age, it's remarkable. But they're all pretty special guys, too.
GO: So often, Bill, we've seen sometime in October, November, December – who knows, maybe even January or February – where we'll see a certain situation and we'll see a player, or players, act accordingly to that situation, and we'll say to ourselves, 'Boy, they're smart players. How did they figure that out?' I heard Tedy Bruschi talking about this today, how much emphasis is dealt with with situations during the summertime. How do you do that? Is it film, is it out there walking guys through it and telling them 'This is the situation. This is what you have to react to'? How do you do it now to get it into their head so that it seems, instinctively, they act later on in the season to that exact situation?
BB: I think just the way you described it. We cover it in meetings, and if we have a situation on film then we try to show examples of those plays. Like kicking off after a safety – that happened last year against Detroit when they got us, or we took the one against Denver in the Monday Night game [in 2003]. Or we had a couple situations come up in the Tennessee game where we got to the line of scrimmage and Tennessee was trying to substitute people and we quick-snapped the ball twice on third down for a couple conversions to take advantage of their not getting off the field quickly enough. So those are the kinds of things that you just never know are going to happen. We had that same situation come up last year in the Jet game, two or three times, when it was the same type of thing. So the thing about the situations is you never know when they're going to happen, or if they're going to happen. So this is the type of thing you work on in training camp. You keep going over it and then if the situation presents itself during the game during the season hopefully you're able to do it.
GO: It's an endless list, though. Do you see in other games other situations come up that you add to the list and say 'Here's another one we have to think of'?
BB: Without a doubt. Yes, a lot of times you get a play in a game, or you're watching another game breaking it down, and you see something come up and say 'We haven't talked about this. Here's what we'd do in that situation.' But a lot of times we just put so many seconds on the clock, put 40 seconds on the clock, you're down by whatever, the ball's here, and we just play. And you don't know if you're going to get sacked, you don't know if you're going to gain two yards, you don't know if you're going to gain 20 yards, but then that creates the next situation, on both sides of the ball. And the field position changes and the clock changes, and you mix the timeouts in – sometimes you have them, sometimes you don't. Sometimes you need a field goal, sometimes you need a touchdown. And again, sometimes the defense will intercept a pass and run it back for a touchdown and then that changes the whole situation. Maybe the offense will score a touchdown on the first play and now you're trying to run out the clock instead of score if you get it back. So a lot of it we try to create, and some of it, when we play out the situation, we just let happen, and whatever happens we just have to react. The coaches and the players just have to react to those situations and they're not scripted and that's good for all of us. It helps us as coaches and players think on the run, because you can't plan out exactly what's going to happen. You just don't know.
SD: Are you satisfied with the progress of your mostly-new receiving corps?
BB: I think we have a long way to go. We've been at it here for a few weeks, but we have several more months of football. I think that we're making progress as a football team – I'd say that about every position – but I don't think we're anywhere near where we need to be by mid-season or by the end of the season. I think we've got a lot of steps to take there, but I like the way that the players are working. I think that we've got a good attitude, we've worked hard and I think we're trying to take the corrections from a practice or a game and improve on them the following opportunity we get to work on them. We're getting better in a lot of areas, but we still have a long way to go. I wouldn't say I'd be satisfied with anything about our team right now, but it's a lot better than it was one, two weeks ago, and we still have a long way to go.
PS: Is it possible 81 might take a run down the field on Friday night? Is that possible?
BB: Randy's day-to-day. We'll see how he comes along on Friday. Today's Monday. I know that he had a good weekend and he's a lot better than he was when we played on Friday. So we'll just take it day-to-day.
PP: I heard you talking about how difficult it was to let go of a guy like Artrell Hawkins the other day…
BB: Right.
PP: Any particular reasoning as to the timing of it, why it may have been more beneficial to do it so early?
BB: I think with a player like Artrell, and Josh Miller, both were we just saw other people, at this time, had moved ahead of them. We wanted to, out of respect for them, give them the opportunity, before everybody was going down to the final cut, to maybe find an opportunity with somebody else. I think that's fair to them. The toughest thing for a veteran player is to go on that last cut when all the rosters are now trimmed down to 53 and there's really no space available and a team has to cut somebody to take somebody and all that. Not that we're trying to help anybody else out, but we want to be fair and respectful to those players and that's the way we saw the situation going at that particular position. You know, that can change in a hurry. We've had plenty of players that we've had on our roster that we've released that we've re-signed and brought back, so that could change in a hurry. Both of those guys have done a lot for us over the last couple years and who knows what will happen in the future.
GO: Laurence Maroney not wearing the red contact jersey today. Does that mean there's a better shot of seeing him on Friday?
BB: Well, sure. I think everybody's doing better, and Laurence is. Laurence has been working but we were able to step up the contact with him a little bit. But we'll take it day-to-day and see where he is at the end of the week.
GO: Could you explain how the PUP [physically unable to perform list] works once you get to the regular season?
BB: Sure, Glenn. The rule is that when you get to the 53-man cut-down that you have really one of three choices. You can either take a player off the PUP list and make him active and count him on the 53. You can place him on injured reserve and he would be out for the year. Or you could place him on a what they call a reserve PUP, which means that he cannot play for the next six weeks, through the middle of October after the sixth game, and then between the sixth game and the twelfth game you could activate the player to your roster, or, if you didn't want to activate him, if he wasn't healthy at that point or you just couldn't activate him for whatever reason, then you could place him on injured reserve at that point. Basically, the rule is designed for a player who's not quite ready to play when the season starts but you don't want to keep him out for the whole year. But he does count on the 80, which, those players have all counted on our 80-man count all through training camp. So you don't get a replacement for them, but at the 53-count it gives them a little bit more time to finish their rehab and still be able to play the season without taking that initial 53-man roster spot.
GO: It puts you guys in a position where you've got to pretty much kind of figure out how long this guy is going to be out. I know Bruschi was on that PUP list, right?
BB: Right.
GO: The six-week PUP list. So you left the door open because you knew there was a possibility. But isn't it difficult to do it at that time? I mean, how can the medical staff sit there and say 'OK, this is the window'? It's got to be difficult, I would think.
BB: Well, again, it depends on the injury the player's dealing with. Sometimes it's a tough call. Sometimes it's a tough call. Sometimes a player's coming off of a surgery, or maybe an ACL-type of injury that's a longer rehab, and you just know that it's going to be more time. Sometimes if it's a broken bone, which we all know about what the healing time on those is. You know, bones are bones, so that's kind of a set timeframe. It's a little different than ligaments, which are muscles that have to get tightened back up or whatever. So it just depends on what the injury is and what the medical people say. If they think that the player's definitely going to be out for a certain period of time and he needs that time to rehab then there's no sense in carrying him on the active roster.
GO: All right Bill, we'll talk again next week. Hopefully Fred will be here. We'll get him back in here.
BB: OK.
GO: But then I can't guarantee it. We'll also start opening up the Coach's Question every week.
BB: That sounds good. Thanks Paul, Steve. Pete, as always. Glenn. Talk to you next week.
[Crosstalk and laughter]
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