BB postgame - New England Patriots Forums

SVN · 12-07-2008, 09:24 PM

Belichick Q&A - Reiss' Pieces - Boston.com

some interesting comments

Quote:

(On New England’s defensive game plan…)
We had to cut it back a little bit. We had a little trouble, obviously, the first couple of drives. Seattle had a lot of quick, uptempo plays and we were scrambling a little bit to get where we needed to be. We tried to settle down a little bit. That, combined with some of the people who weren’t able to finish the game, just all kind of added up to, let’s just kind of get back to basics. Probably in the end that served us well.

Quote:

On playing basic defense…)
I thought we got good pressure on the quarterback on a lot of plays. We just couldn’t tackle him. He was elusive out there. He scrambled out and got a couple of throws on us, and then he scrambled around and ran a couple of times. So at the end we just brought everybody and hoped he wouldn’t be able to get away from us, because that was a big concern, the amount of time, especially at the end of a game, we were a little bit winded. With the quarterback running around, look what happened on the first-down play where it seemed like we had two or three guys in the backfield and he ends up scrambling for whatever it was, 25 yards. So we wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again.

(On applying defensive pressure…)
We tried to get pressure all the way around, outside and inside, to try and keep the quarterback in there. But we weren’t really successful doing it. We had pressure, but he’s just elusive back there and we couldn’t get him. You’ve got to try and keep him in the pocket and hem him in, but Wallace is a hard guy to do that against. We knew how athletic he was and, as I said, at the end we just ended up bringing enough guys so there weren’t any extra gaps in there.

i guess that answers somewhat the question of getting outschemed etc...