Bill Belichick's Post Game Press Conference Transcript

OPENING STATEMENT:

The broadcast cut in late, but here is the transcript:

"...there's certainly a lot of things we can learn from tonight. I thought our players went out there and tried to compete for 60-minutes. Obviously a lot of things we've got to work on, but we're under way and we'll just keep plugging along. Hopefully we can build on tonight, build on this week, and have a good week next week and start piling things up so we'll be ready to go on opening day."

On what he saw out there tonight that he liked

"We competed. Competed for sixty minutes. I thought we worked hard."

On what he deems a success going into a preseason game

"If we can improve and do the things and execute the things we want to do. We'll look at the film, see how all that goes, see what things we need a little more work on, what things we are doing fairly well. You could have several guys do things well and have one break down and you don't have a good play necessarily but it doesn't mean that some of the other elements or parts of the play aren't there. So we'll see how that looks. Or maybe they'll be multiple things that broke down on certain plays and it didn't show up on the play, we got away with it, but we still need to get those things fixed. So we'll take a good look at the fim and correct our mistakes. I mean that's what this is for."

On his thoughts on Chandler Jones and if it's a continuation of the things he's done at practice:

"I think really all the players that I saw, especially the rookies, some of them did some good things. There's a long way to go, we've got a lot of work to do. I don't want to get too up or to down on anything. We just want to keep working and getting better."

On if he'd consider his offensive line a work in progress:

"We played a lot of people at every position. So I don't think there was any position that we didn't play a lot of people. That's what these games are there for, to evaluate the players."

On what Dane Fletcher brings to the team:

"Well he's played on all four downs for us. He's played on first and second down, played on third down and played in the kicking game. He has some versatility and he's had roles on different downs at different times or in different game plans. So he's done all those things to some degree."

On if he had a good offseason:

"Yeah."

On the fact they just got off the field and his status

"We'll evaluate him like we do with any situation like that and see what the doctors say. I'm not a doctor Tom [Curran], you know that."

On if he was comfortable with the way the game was officiated

"[Laughs] I think Mike Pereira's [former Vice President of Officiating for the NFL] made his comments on the officials. I don't know who knows more about NFL officiating than Mike Pereira, so I'll leave it to him to... I'm just trying to coach our team and get our team better, not worry about what everyone else is doing. That's not my job."

On the fact a lot of the first defense saw so much time in the first half

"We rotated players. Some players, I mean I think they all played about...well, where we had some guys rotate and then they played longer, and where we didn't rotate and those guys didn't play as long."

On the fact Fletcher Started alongside Hightower in the middle

"As you know he's been playing all three positions all through training camp."

On if the plan was to play him there to show his versatility:

"He's been playing there all through camp so..."

On the play of his two runningbacks

"Which two? We had five guys."

Ridley and Vereen, how did they look?

"Some good things, some things we've got to work on. But they competed. I thought they made some plays. There was a couple reads and technique things that could have been better. But we can say that about everybody."

[inaudible - related to the runningbacks?]

"I wouldn't say we lit it up offensively at any point or in any aspect of the game. But I thought each of them had their...we had some good things, we had some other things that weren't so good that we need to improve on, some corrections we have to make., timing things we need to work on. It's like that at every position."