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August 30, 2007

Bill Belichick post-game press conference

Courtesy of the New England media relations department:

BB: We got a look at a lot of our young players tonight. They got a lot of extensive playing time. I really respect the way they played. I thought they competed well. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was certainly competitive. I thought we had a lot of guys play well. I think it will be interesting to look at the film here tomorrow morning to see how some things came together. The Giants have a good football team. We saw some competition against some of their better players. It will be interesting to see how all of that looks tomorrow. I respect the job that they did tonight. I thought overall we played a fairly solid game.

Can we take the way you played your personnel to mean that you are pretty happy with where your starters are?
I wouldn’t say that. I said last week, those guys that played a lot in the Carolina game, or that have played a lot through the course of the preseason, were going to play less tonight. The guys who didn’t play as much in that game played more tonight. That’s really the way we broke it up.

With [Brandon] Meriweather at safety, are you at the point where you can add to his plate and take advantage of his versatility?
He’s worked there some all of camp. He’s worked at safety. He’s worked at the nickel back. He’s worked at corner. He’s gotten good exposure on our secondary and also in the kicking game. He’s gotten a lot of reps at different spots through the course of camp.

Do you envision him doing more work at safety than he has to this point?
We’ll have to see. We’ll have to see.

Were you encouraged with what you saw out there tonight from him?
We’ll take a look at the tape. I thought there were some good things. There were a couple of plays that looked like he might have been a little out of position on, but I think that’s true of everybody. I thought he did some good things. He made a nice play on that in-cut on the second series, or whenever it was. We’ll take a look at the whole body of work rather than just try to go on one or two plays.

Any impressions of [Chris] Hanson’s effort tonight?
I thought it was okay. I thought it was okay. I’ve seen a lot worse, put it that way.

What went into that decision to bring him in?
To try to improve our team. That’s what goes into every decision.

What was it about him you thought was an upgrade?
I thought he had a chance to compete with the performance that we’ve had through the first three games.

Was it tough to see a kid who has worked as hard as Oscar Lua has go down like that?
Sure. We’ll see what the story is on that. I don’t know exactly what the extent of it is. But, yes, you hate to see anybody get injured.

Does that complicate roster moves when somebody gets injured tonight and you only have two days to evaluate the severity?
Yes, that never makes it any easier. You’d like to have as much information [as you can]. You’d like for it to be as clean as possible and when there is a degree of uncertainty and you have to make a guesstimate and just go on partial information, then that’s what you have to do. That’s certainly not the ideal situation. You’d like for it to be more complete.

Were you happy to see some of the kids that you had in there to begin with go up against the Giants’ starters for a series?
Yes. I thought it was good because we really played the same group of people the entire game and it was against different players with the Giants. That will be part of the evaluation too, to see how they played against some of those guys in the first quarter. They had some good players in there. They have a good team.

Vinny [Testaverde] looked like he had a nice touch.
I thought all three quarterbacks did a pretty solid job of running the operation. The Giants came with a decent amount of pressure. They changed some looks up. I thought all three guys did a decent job. We got the ball down the field a little bit. Some plays were better than others, but I thought we handled ourselves okay at the quarterback position.

Was there a certain thing that goes into dressing players but not playing them? Is there something that you want them to get out of the whole thing?
The only players who didn’t dress were the ones that had an injury situation.

But if you’re not going to play a guy, is there a reason why you dress them?
Yes, to go through the regular process. Part of our preparation in the preseason is to get ready for the regular season and that’s mentally going through situations. Nobody has played a full game. Whenever the players aren’t in there, they should be attentive to the situation and be into the game just like they’re going to in a regular season game. Nobody has played in every play in preseason. That goes for everybody.

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