Bill Belichick Doesn’t Care About The Preseason
If the greatest head coach in the history of football doesn’t care about the preseason then why does anybody? Sean McVay punts on the preseason every year and just won the Super Bowl. Does John Harbaugh know his preseason winning streak means nothing? The Patriots were bad this preseason and if you ask Bill Belichick, he will simply tell you he does not care.
“Preseason is preseason,” Belichick said, via Mike Reiss of ESPN. “Preseason is about developing your team for the season and evaluating the players. If you look at the playtime in our games, and any other games, I don’t know don’t think Las Vegas played 30 players, I don’t think Carolina, it must have been 30 players that didn’t play in their game [against us]. That’s not really what preseason is about. Preseason is about evaluating the players that you do play, and taking the practice time — in joint practices or whatever time you have — to prepare your team for the regular season. Where everybody is on that, we’ll see after five-six weeks of the regular season. That’s when we’ll know.
“I don’t think preseason games are a real big indicator of what the team is or isn’t, one way or the other. That’s not about us, it’s about the NFL. But you get a great chance to evaluate players and I think that will be the focus this week of the 1,000 or so transactions that take place across the league. Is there a way you can improve your team? Does somebody want to improve their team from one of your players? And how it all fits together. You can’t have depth everywhere, so you have to choose what positions you want to have depth at on the roster. What positions you want to have depth on the practice squad, assuming you can get all the players you want — which usually you can’t. So that causes some other adjustments. That’s kind of what this week is about — setting your roster, figuring out how you want to try to play the season, and then there will be a lot of adjustments along the way. But you have to start somewhere.”
I’ve spent plenty of time ripping Belichick in recent years but he’s spot on here. Belichick doesn’t know how to draft but he sure knows how to coach. Teams need to get down to 53 players by Tuesday. There are going to be several players who suited up in the preseason that will never play football again. Thank you, Bill. We all needed this quote.
We’re all ready for the season to start.
