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December 5, 2007

Transcript: Bill Belichick's Wednesday press conference

Just a quick rundown here. We got back late Monday night, so we’re going to change the schedule a little bit this week and get back into our normal deal tomorrow. [We’re] just trying to catch up a little bit today. Getting ready for the Steelers – this will be a big challenge for us. They’re very good at everything – good on offense, good on defense, real good skill people in the kicking game. They do an excellent job. They’re a very physical team. They play hard in all three phases of the game, they’re obviously well-coached and defensively they pretty much do it all. They lead the league in points and they’re good against the run, good against the pass, good on third down, good in the red area. They have a lot of three-and-out drives. Their production out of our their front seven guys…The Bengals are a team that has been scoring a lot of points and Pittsburgh shut them down twice. I think that’s an indication of how well they play. Offensively, the Steelers run the ball well and they run it more than anyone else in the league. They’re good on third down, they’re good in the red area. [Adrian] Peterson has a lot of long runs and a lot of yards. [Willie] Parker is second in the NFL to Peterson in most of those categories. I know [Hines] Ward is obviously tough. [Santonio] Holmes is a big-play guy, [Heath] Miller has been very productive for them at tight end, [Najeh] Davenport’s given them some quality snaps at running back behind Parker. Of course, you know, Ben [Roethlisberger]’s an excellent quarterback, a hard guy to tackle, big physical, keeps a lot of plays alive with his scrambling ability. We have a lot of things to get ready for this week -- [Allen] Rossum as a returner. They’re a physical coverage team, just like they are on defense. We have a lot of things to get ready for, [a] short week, and we’ll try to utilize our time the best we can to try to make sure we get all our bases covered by Sunday.

Just to double check, the guys are not practicing today?
Right.

Is that an acknowledgement of the short week and the three straight primetime games? Do you sense the guys dragging a little bit?
That’s just where we are. We have a lot of things that we’re going to cover and walk through. We’ll be on the field tomorrow.

You mentioned Willie Parker and what he’s done. Can you give a little breakdown? Would you describe him as a hard-hitting back between the tackles or a guy that can get outside?
He can pretty much go anywhere. He’s fast, he’s explosive, he’s a good inside runner, a good outside runner, he’s got excellent speed so he can turn a short run into a long one. He’s not a three-yards-in-a-cloud-of-dust guy. He’s fast, he’s athletic, plays well in space and he’s got good power.

Can you talk about the Steelers secondary in general, and Ike Taylor specifically?
Taylor primarily plays on our right being a big, physical kid, [a] good tackler, strong, physical on the line of scrimmage. In regular, the shakedowns and plays on the other side for him, Deshea {Townsend] moves into the nickel position in sub when [Bryant] McFadden comes in the game. Of course, their safeties – [Anthony] Smith and [Troy] Polamalu or [Tyrone] Carter, who’s been there for Polamalu a little bit the last couple of games -- they’re all physical, they’re all fast and they cover a lot of ground back there. It’s an overall fast secondary, physical, [a] hard-hitting group. Like I said, Taylor’s really the perimeter corner on everything and Townsend plays outside when there’s two corners in the game. When there’s three corners in the game, then he moves into the slot.

As a follow up to that, there are a lot of big-name corners out there. Taylor’s name hasn’t been mentioned with a lot of the elite guys, but he’s had a very good year so far and the Steelers have been tough. Do you have any observations on his play?
Just what I said. He’s big, he’s physical, he’s a good tackler, he’s strong. The Steelers play a lot of zone coverage, so you don’t see them in a lot of man-to-man situations. Some on third down. But that’s their style of play and I think he plays it well. I mean, their whole defense plays well.

Are you proud in any way that given the number of blowouts that that didn’t lull your team to sleep, that they’re still able to play situational football in crunch-time and execute these last two weeks? In a lot of the games you’ve played previously, you didn’t need pinpoint execution late in the game because you were already up by 35?
Each game has it’s own plays and points to it, so some of those games we went out and executed some things very well early, got some turnovers, put points on the board, took advantage of field position and so forth. This was a game Monday that there was less of that and it came down to some situational plays at the end of the game and we were fortunate to make a few more of them than they did. As you said, it was some of the different plays that some similar elements from Philadelphia, or even going back to Indianapolis. Each game is it’s own entity. We just have to deal with whatever the circumstances and the situation [are] in that particular game and try to execute it to the best of our ability.

Did you ever worry that in the blowouts the guys would lose the ability to do that, or were you confident that when it was called upon to make crunch-time plays late in the game that you never forget how to do that just because you’ve won some big, blowout games?
As I said, I think it came up in the Indianapolis game a month ago. Down by 10 with 10 minutes to go – that’s playing from behind. There were elements of it in that game and then two games later against Philadelphia, we’re down again in the fourth quarter. I hope we don’t make a habit of that. I think it’s harder to play the game that way, but [it’s a] complement to the players that they were able in those situations to make those plays, but it really requires that you make just about all of them and there’s not much margin for error when you put yourself in that situation. Fortunately, we were able to make them this week, but it’s not the optimum situation to be in. It’s not where we’re trying to be.

Can we revisit the situation with the kickoff at the end, the unusual one where it was at the 35-yard line? I’m just curious, what would have happened if Steven [Gostkowski] had kicked it out of bounds? Would they have had the option to have you re-kick? Would they have gotten it at the five yard line, and has that ever come up? I know you talk about situations a lot. It just seemed very unusual.
Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it come up. The rule would have been a half the distance to the goal line penalty, so it would have been on I guess the 17 and a half.

It was obviously an emotional game. Some of the Ravens were talking about the referees wanting the Patriots to win and all of that kind of stuff. Do you have any reaction to that kind of talk?
No, we’re focused on what we’re doing.

Can you talk about defending the Hail Mary at the end of the game? Eric Alexander made the key tackle down there. Is he normally in your Hail Mary defense, or what was the idea of having him back there?
Well, the situation wasn’t quite as clear-cut as what sometimes it would be. There were eight seconds to go in the game and the ball was on…I think it was Baltimore’s 45-yard line. Probably if they’d gotten the ball to the 30, they would have had an opportunity to attempt a 50-yard field goal, and so that’s only 25 yards. So, with eight seconds, you definitely would have time to run a deep sideline route or maybe a short corner route from the slot-receiver, that kind of thing. Get out of bounds and either kick a field goal or be throwing a Hail Mary from maybe the 40-yard line or the 35-yard line, instead of from the minus 45. You can pick up some yardage there. So we had to defend the 15-20 yard kind of pass, too, with only eight seconds to go, as well as the deep one. We were back there, we defended the goal line. If the ball was caught in front of it, like it was, and tackled, then the game’s over. That’s obviously what happened. We were trying to go up for it. There was definitely some contact down there, but in any case, the idea was to set a fence on the goal line if the ball was thrown in front of us and make sure that they didn’t get it in. Our players were in the end zone, expecting the ball to come down further in the end zone, where we would definitely need to play it and obviously not let them catch it in the end zone. If they catch it in front of us and allow us to tackle them, then that would still be a successful play in that situation, and that’s kind of how it worked out. But it wasn’t a clear-cut Hail Mary situation. They didn’t have to do that with eight seconds to go, but they did it. Had they gotten it a little bit closer, then I think the ball would have come down in the end zone instead of short of it.

The skill is as the ball is coming down, but then once the ball is in his hands, is that just pure luck? Is there anything you can coach the guys to do, other than just swat it down?
Well, yeah, I think there’s a lot of coaching involved in the play. You don’t want everybody jumping for the ball, or if it gets tipped, you don’t have anybody on the guys standing around getting the tip. There’s also a chance that you could knock each other off, so you’d want to keep it clear so your jumper that can go up and get the ball can go up and get it. Again, part of the problem with that play was one of our players that was trying to jump, wasn’t…There was quite a bit of contact there and [he] wasn’t able to go up.

Getting back to the day off from practice today, is it kind of more a product of the three night games in a row and the players needing a rest or a break?
No. No. After a Monday night game, it’s a shorter week and we feel like this is the schedule that gives us – The bigger part of the problem is not, I think, practice with the players. It’s for the coaches to be ready for the players when they come in here. As I said, Pittsburgh is a hard team to prepare for. What you don’t want to do – What I don’t think you want to do is give your team a game plan and then you do more work on the team [and] find out, well, this isn’t quite what we want here and we need to change this and we need to change that. We felt it was just better to take a little more time ourselves from a coaching standpoint, a staff standpoint, to make sure that with the extra time we had this morning that we could get things as close to exactly the way we want them so when we do give them to the players that we don’t have to go back and change them. There are always little adjustments that you make, but so you don’t have to go back and make a lot of major changes and adjustments in your game plan, when you start you’re headed in the right direction and you don’t have to change that course during the week. That’s not a good position to be in, in terms of preparing your team. We’ll get a full day in here, we’ll get a lot done what we normally get done on Wednesday and then we’ll move on to Thursday tomorrow and we’ll be ready to go on Thursday.

I believe this is the fourth team you’re playing this year with a first-year head coach. Does that at all factor into the time it takes you guys to prepare?
I mean, each team has it’s own elements that you have to prepare for, from the coaches to the players to the coordinators to all of the other things that affect the game. In terms of your preparation, you put all of those things together and figure out what you want to do. But each team is unique, each team is hard to prepare for. There are a lot of things that you have to deal with and you try to analyze all of them and then sort it out and figure out what you want to do. The Steelers are obviously a very good football team. They’re good in all three phases of the game. They’re playing very well right now and they’re a huge challenge to get ready for. Mike [Tomlin] has done a great job with the team. The players are good, the coaches are good, they have good coordinators, they’re sound, they’re tough, they’re well-disciplined. That’s why they’re 9-3.

I know Tomlin came from a 4-3 background. Have you seen elements of that in Pittsburgh’s defense or are they still pretty much strictly 3-4?
I think they’re basically running the same defense they ran previously when Bill [Cowher] was there and when [Dick] LeBeau was the coordinator. They’ve carried it over to LeBeau as a coordinator and kept it pretty much in tact from what it’s been. I don’t see a lot of difference from what they did last year, defensively.

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