Nothing says football season like Bill Belichick dodging and weaving questions like Muhammed Ali in his prime.

At 8 A.M. on Wednesday upwards of 80 media members joined the Zoom call for Coach Belichick hoping to get at least a little bit of insight into the decision to release Cam Newton while keeping Mac Jones as the starting quarterback. Instead, there was some extremely awkward vaccination conversations and a clear unwillingness to answer any questions regarding Newton.

“Well, I mean, I don’t rank them,” he said when asked if it was a tough decision to release Newton after he had clearly bought in to whatever Belichick sold him. “We make decisions, and then we execute them and go on and take it from there.”

After the fiasco last week that very well may have handed Jones the job, it’s fair to ask whether Newton’s vaccination status had anything to do with his release. That question came up and that’s when things got weird.

“No,” he said. “You guys keep talking about that, and I would just point out that I don’t know what the number is. I mean, you guys can look it up. You have the access to a lot of information, but the number of players and coaches and staff members that have been infected by COVID in this training camp [around the NFL] who have been vaccinated is a pretty high number, so I wouldn’t lose sight of that.”

That wasn’t the only strange answer from the head coach regarding vaccinations either.

“We have other players on the team who aren’t vaccinated, as I would say, probably does every other team in the league,” he added. “We’ve had minimal throughout the league. There’ve been a number of, quite a high number I would say, of players who have had the virus who have been vaccinated, so your implication that vaccination solves every problem, I would say that has not been substantiated based on what’s happened in training camp [throughout the NFL] this year. That’s all.”

We’re not turning this into a vaccinated or unvaccinated story, but when asked if the Newton absence and the three days that Jones shined in camp were ultimately when Mac won the starting nod, Bill again remained icy cold for really no reason.

“Yeah. I don’t know,” he muttered. “I’m not going to go into details of decisions and the timing and all that. We’d be here forever. It’s a process. It was a very competitive situation at that position. Both players took pretty close to an equal number of repetitions, and in total, between practice games going all the way back to the spring. That’s what it was.”

He did eventually throw everyone a bit of a bone when talking about Jones, but it wasn’t the answer you’d expect from a guy who now has quite a bit riding on the success of the rookie QB.

“First of all, he’s had a high level of production,” said Belichick. “I feel like he’s been able to show an ability to do things the way we want them done at a productive level. He’s young. I’m sure he’ll continue to learn and grow. We’ll see where that goes, but that’s why we drafted him. I think he’s come in and performed at a level that supports that.”

It’s pretty clear that Belichick and the organization weren’t happy with Newton for putting this distraction on the table, but now that he’s gone it was a bit strange Belichick wasn’t willing to talk a bit more about the kid or at the very least thank Cam for his time here. Instead, it appears things may have ended badly and we got grumpy Bill earlier than normal this season.