Bill Belichick's Post Game Press Conference Transcript
Opening Statement:
“I thought it was real nice job by the players today. We got great contributions from all three phases of our team and the players really stepped up and delivered some big plays throughout the game. I thought we played good complementary football. All three units worked together. They did a good job. They did a great job of executing and playing for 60 minutes and I thought we did enough good things out there obviously to win. So that was good to see. But they deserve a lot of credit, it was a good week of practice, it was good week of preparation and that showed up out on the field. Not perfect, but I’ll take it."
On his thoughts on Aqib Talib:
“I’ll have to take a look at the film. It was great to see him run back a touchdown [on the] interception. We’ll take a look at everybody, I couldn’t tell.”
On whether not they were able to maximize some coverages by moving them around:
“No not really. We didn’t change much defensively.”
On his thoughts on Julian Edelman:
“Julian had a couple of big plays for us and he’s another guy who’s worked hard. He missed some time there after the Baltimore game and has really worked hard to do everything to get back. The return game, the passing game, slip screens, stuff like that…blocking, so that was great. He had, obviously, a real productive day and we needed that. It was good to complement some of the other production that we had there.”
On how important Rob Gronkowski’s contributions were to the offense:
“He does a great job for us. Blocking, receiving, third down, red area, he’s a good player.”
On the pressure they were able to put on Andrew Luck:
“I thought our guys on defense did a good job. We got our hands on a lot of balls, we dropped a few, we caught some, I thought we were able to put some pressure on him. He’s active in the pocket, and he can avoid some pressure in there but I thought we did a good job of getting on him. Their receivers made some really good catches, there’s five or six times where I thought we were kind of draped all over him and it didn’t seem like there was much space at all to get the ball in and he got it in, and they caught it. Then there was other times we got our hands on the ball and didn’t catch them, there was other times we got our hands on the ball and we did catch them. I thought it was competitive, but they made some good plays. They’ve got a good group of skilled players and they made some good, good throws and tough catches in there where I thought we had them covered pretty well that they were still able to execute it.”
On the play of Chandler Jones and the pressure he was able to put on Luck:
“We’ll watch the film on that too. But I thought overall we had some pressure on the quarterback. We either hit him, or made him move around back there a little bit. We had our moments.”
On his thoughts on the play of the offensive line:
“Better in protection probably overall in the running game. But we had a couple long runs on some outside plays. They did a good job stopping the run. I thought our line did a pretty good job protecting but again, that really ties in with the receivers because if the guys are open, then the quarterback doesn’t have to hold the ball and he can get rid of it and Tom does a good job of that. That was something we really emphasized with the receivers this week was if they played a lot of man coverage, which they did, that we’d have to get open quickly so we didn’t have to stand back there and hold the ball and wait all day for them to get ope, and they did that. So it was good. Good complimentary football all the way around.”
On the fact he did a lot of work with the defense using the whiteboard and what the message was there as he was working with them because it seemed like they did a much better job after that point:
“We were talking about the plays that happened earlier in the game.”
On if there was an adjustment made at that point:
“No, nothing that we hadn’t worked on.”
