Bill Belichick is taking a nonchalant public stance towards the Patriots’ brutal preseason.
Hopefully he’s acting with a bit more urgency in private. The Patriots used to enjoy the luxury of taking the first month of the season to work out their kinks. But that was when Tom Brady was under center, and the AFC East was horrible.
It’s a different reality today.
On “The Greg Hill Show” Monday, Belichick refused to grade the Patriots on their sloppy summer performance, which culminated in a particularly embarrassing 23-6 loss to the Raiders Friday night. “No, preseason’s preseason,” he said. “Preseason is about developing your team for the season and evaluating players. If you look at the play-time in our game, or any other games, I mean I don’t know, I don’t think Las Vegas played 30 players, I don’t think Carolina — there must have been 30 players that didn’t play in that game — that’s not really what preseason’s about. Preseason’s about evaluating the players that you do play, and taking the practice time in joint practices or whatever you have to prepare your team for the regular season.”
Fair enough. But reports out of joint practices indicated the Patriots weren’t playing well in those spots, either. Onlookers said the Raiders outclassed the Patriots for most of the week in Vegas.
Their practice series the previous week against Carolina devolved into a royal rumble.
Those are both bad signs. But Belichick is talking like somebody who has faith his team will figure it out.
“Where everybody is on that, we’ll see after five, six weeks of the regular season,” he said. “That’s when we’ll know. I don’t think preseason games are a real big indicator of what the team is or isn’t, one way or the other. That’s not about us, it’s about the NFL.”
Since the 2011 collective bargaining agreement curtailed the number of times players can practice with pads, the Patriots have seemingly treated September as an extension of the preseason. That was the case last season, when they went 1-3 before embarking on a seven-game winning streak.
But then the Patriots crashed at the end, losing four of their last five games — including a humiliating 30-point playoff loss to the Bills. The Patriots no longer play their best football when the calendar shifts to December and January. The previous year, they went 2-3 over their last five games, counting a meaningless victory over the Jets in Week 17.
During Brady’s final season, they went 4-5 down the stretch, counting the playoffs.
The Patriots haven’t been an elite second-half team for three years. Yet, Belichick is still talking like it’s 2018. It doesn’t seem like he grasps the current situation.
Even dating back to the NFL meetings, Belichick grunted about how the Patriots have lost and changed coaches around before — once again ignoring the fact that Brady was his quarterback.
The Patriots aren’t good enough to punt on the first third of the season. Belichick’s platitudes better not mirror his mindset.
