Bill Belichick Situation Quotations

There's no situation I've been in, before or since, that even would remotely approach that one for negativity and affecting the overall focus of the team. Not within 100 miles. It touched every single person in the building, every secretary, every ball boy. I felt badly for everyone involved.

It?s always good to make those yards when you need them, like in short yardage and goal line situations or like that third quarter (against the Jets) when you're going into the wind. You want to try to control the clock a little bit. Those are important yards, too. I think we can do a better job in running the ball than we did. I hope we can.

I enjoy the competition of all the games. I love to coach and be in a competitive situation where we're up against the greatest players and the greatest coaches on a weekly basis. It's very challenging but it's very exciting, and that?s true every week.

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 learned about the inflation range situation. Obviously with our footballs being inflated to the 12.5-pound range, any deflation would then take us under that specification limit. Knowing that now, in the future we will certainly inflate the footballs above that low level to account for any possible change during the game.

We have absolutely done as much work as we can on finding out things like that and we'll try to get all the information that we can as that would apply to any current situation, which I can't talk about.

I cannot comment on any player who has ongoing criminal charges and legal situations.

We didn't want to play him on defense last year. That was an emergency, desperation type of situation and of course Troy handled it wall...But he's a better receiver than he is a defensive back.

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.

You can?t worry too much about other guys on your team and what their situation is because you can go out there the first day of training camp and that could change on one play. I don?t feel like we can look at it that way - and we don?t.

What Mike does a great job of is he understands defense, and he understands what causes you the most problems and where you don't want to be defensively. Then he tries to put you in that situation as much as possible. Then based on how you react to that, then that's where he likes to attack.

You would have to talk to the Jets. I have no comment on their job or their situation or anything else. Anything they have to say about it, I'm sure they would be more than happy to give you that information.

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.

We'll take a look at Tom's situation and we'll make an evaluation there. We'll talk about that and make the decision later on in the week. We'll just have to wait and see.

How will it be going forward? We'll just have to see how that all plays itself out. That's something we'll talk about later on depending on what the situation is.

You get into the situation where you have an experienced player that gives you a certain quality of play, and you have a younger player who you think is going to be better but he's not better now,

We'll do the same thing that we always do. We'll take every situation from week to week and do what we think is best for that week and evaluate it on that basis.

I felt that once we got to the 31, 32 yard line, we were in field goal range. We didn't want to get in the situation where we throw a couple incomplete passes and Pittsburgh had another timeout. It's like basketball; we were playing for the last shot.

Every situation is independent. It takes two parties, or three to a point, to make a deal, and when that happens, we have one, and if it doesn't, we don't.

The running back situation is a good, competitive one. I think Antowain and Kevin are good players, have good, solid strengths. I think both of those players are going to be productive for us. They have been in the past. How exactly it's going to work out, I don't know. I'm sure it will be decided on the field. We'll do what we think is best for the team.

Mike?s always been one of our most versatile players. He?s a smart player. He?s been in a number of different situations and handles them all well. We have a lot of confidence in him whenever he?s on the field. He?s a fast learner and he picks up things quickly.