It’s not often you get a glimpse at what’s going on with Patriots coach Bill Belichick. But this week, the man’s given us two indications that he’s hunkering down for these playoffs as if he was planning D-Day redux.
The Patriots will be home for their first playoff off game of the 2012-2013 season Sunday against Houston (4:30) and nobody – least of all Belichick – is taking the Texans lightly despite the pounding they took at Gillette Stadium last month.
Earlier this week, Belichick told the media that you don’t win games by sitting in your foxhole, and that you have to attack.
Friday, when talking about planning for the unexpected, Belichick again used a military analogy ”¦ and at the same time left you wondering whether he’d taken a couple of hours out of his busy schedule to view the film “Zero Dark Thirty.”
“Who knows how the game will go – what they’ll do, how things will match up,” he said. “There will be different breaks or situations in the game that’ll make each game unique. You just take it as it comes.
” It’s like when you talk to the Navy SEALs and those guys about when they go on a mission, how they talk about, ‘Alright, so we get there and we practiced going over a six-foot wall and the wall is 30-feet high.’
“Well, that’s the way it is in the NFL,” he said. “You practice for whatever. You think you’re going to swim across a 200-yard lake and the lake is 800 yards across. You have to get across it. You get in an NFL game and think you’re going to get this and then you get that. Or you think they’re going to play this guy and they play some other guy. You face new challenges. That’s part of gamesmanship and part of the competition ”¦ everybody has to figure it out and make the best of it. That’s what makes this a great game.”
Friday’s generally the best day of the week to get the expansive Belichick. And as the playoffs heat up, the coach seems to soften. He’s generally much more forthcoming when the national media comes calling than he is with the locals.
He gave the above answer when someone asked him whether nerves factor into the way he coaches.
Yes, he said. He’s nervous for every game – even the ones in the preseason.
“There’s an anxiousness whenever you play,” he said.
“The leading-up process (to the game), yeah, sure there are definitely butterflies in your stomach,” he said. “But I get that in preseason games, regular season games. When you play a game, a preseason game, a postseason game, whatever it is, there’s the element of unknown – that’s the competition. Sure, each of those is a little bit different.”
However, despite the war-like lingo, and despite preparation that might seem tedious and time-consuming to some, Belichick said he actually likes the process.
“Really, I enjoy all of it,” he said. ” This is what it’s all for. Once we get to this game, that’s what everything we’ve put into the season all comes down to. We all know we’re in a one-game season. If we all perform well on Sunday then our season can extend. If we don’t, it won’t. We have to be at our best on Sunday and that’s all of us – every player, every coach, all of us that are involved in the game.”
We’ll how much he likes it by around 8 p.m. Sunday.
Steve Krause can be reached at [email protected].
