Bill Belichick has made it pretty clear over years of press conferences that he doesn’t really embrace reporters questioning his in-game decisions.
Such queries are often met with non-answers and dismissive tone.
That was the case Sunday night following the loss to the Broncos when Belichick was asked about his decision not to challenge the spot on a fourth-quarter James White run that was marked down for a 2-yard gain on third-and-3 despite the fact that it certainly appeared that the veteran back kept his feet until he was well past the first-down marker.
Asked in his postgame video call if he thought about challenging the spot, Belichick responded simply with “No, not really.”
A follow-up asked if the coach got a second look at the run?
“I just answered the question,” Belichick said.
Not really, this was a new question. But Belichick deflected it and reporters moved on, at least for the time being.
During his Monday afternoon video call with local reporters, Belichick was ask a more general question as to whether he felt good about the internal process that goes on when considering a would-be challenge and whether he got the information he needed to make the decision on the White play and others.
Belichick said he does feel like he got the information he needed to make his decisions, before his answer veered off into some sarcasm pretty clearly directed at reporters.
“It’s nice to be able to sit up there and watch replay after replay. And have unlimited challenges. But that’s just not the way it is.
So, we don’t have unlimited challenges.” Belichick said before bringing up a challenge decision he actually got right on a Cam Newton touchdown run that was originally ruled short of the goal line. “We challenged the touchdown, the quarterback sneak on the touchdown because we thought that was enough to overturn it. There’s a lot of close plays out there. If you challenge all of them then you run out of timeouts and run out of challenges and everything else. So you have to pick out the ones that you think are the right ones. It’s certainly an unscientific process, but I feel like we take the information and do the best we can.
“I’m sure it could be done better, I’m sure there’s other people who could manage it better, but we’ll just do the best that we can.”
The message here is pretty simple. Belichick didn’t like to be challenged by reporters in regards to his decisions about in-game challenges.
