By Mason Sousa
Bill Belichick in his press conference on Monday morning, 13 days before the regular season begins:
“I’ve heard a lot of people comment on that September is an extension of the preseason… there’s some truth to that”
I couldn’t disagree any more about that philosophy… especially when talking about the 2022 New England Patriots. There’s a new offense being implemented with new coaches on that side of the ball coaching it plus the team is in a stacked conference.
They need to be firing on all cylinders by Week 1 to have a chance to be a playoff team.
Bill Belichick also went on to say “You don’t really know where your team is until mid October and have played 5, 6, 7 games”
While it is accurate that a team will most likely be a better version of themselves at the midpoint of the season compared to Week 1, a piece of that mindset says to me ‘oh we’ll work things out in September and go from there’ and that shouldn’t exist for this 2022 team. With the competition the Patriots are slated to go up against and the number of teams that have deep postseason aspirations in their conference they need to hit the ground running in order to be playing ball in the middle of January.
Yes of course almost every team (minus the elite teams) is trying to figure themselves out and establish an identity at the start of the year. Coaches have a general feeling at the very least about what their team does better than most and how they should attack the opponent. And yes, every team, in theory, will be a better version of themselves at the midpoint of the season than the start of September. They will have real games under their belts and understand what works and what doesn’t for the most part. But after what we’ve seen this Training Camp and Preseason (that included the starters getting shutdown by the Raiders backups) the offense seems like they are trying to find anything that flat out works rather than what they do best.
And I think Bill Belichick knows that.
He’s telling us we won’t know what kind of team we have until about Halloween.
A neat little trick of verbalizing his confidence level in the team currently speaking.