Belichick takes some positives from first preseason game

After the Patriots? 22-11 loss to the Green Bay Packers in Thursday night?s preseason opener, Bill Belichick had some positive things to say during his Friday morning conference call with the media. Among other things, he answered questions about the pass rush, Jimmy Garoppolo, James White, and Aaron Rodgers.
In his opening statement, Belichick said, “After watching the film this morning, I think we probably saw about what we expected to see. Individually, there were some good things, and there were obviously things we need to correct and improve on. I think there are a lot of things that we?ve worked on in practice that showed up positively in the game.”
When asked about how he thought the Patriots? defense played early in the game, Belichick had some good things to say.
?I thought, with the exception of a couple of plays, overall our pass coverage was competitive and our pass rush was competitive,” he said. “Some good things, some things we can improve on in all those situations, but I thought, overall last night, our coverage with the exception of probably a couple of plays was pretty competitive against a pretty good passing team.”
Belichick went on to say that playing against a quarterback like Aaron Rodgers is good for his team.
?I think it?s a great opportunity for our team defensively,” he said. “They were out there for a quite a bit. It would probably be the equivalent of close to a half of a regular game ? it was 30-some plays. Certainly with a quarterback the caliber of Aaron, any mistake that you make is a problem.
?He was able to take advantage of some of our coverage that maybe wasn?t as tight as it needed to be in certain situations. There were times we didn?t do a good job in our overall coordination of the pass rush, and he escaped the pocket relatively easily. We needed to do a better job than we did. He exposed some things and those are good learning situations for us.”
When asked about his second-year running back, James White, Belichick said he saw some good things.
?I think James has had a real good training camp. He?s a versatile player that has shown the ability to play on all four downs, does a good job in the passing game,” Belichick said. “He had an opportunity to pick up the blitz, make some catches, handle the ball a little bit. I thought he did a good job in the open field of making a couple players miss and gaining some extra yards. So, it was a good step for him. He really didn?t get a chance to play very much last year after preseason, and James has worked hard.”
Then came the Garoppolo questions. First, Belichick was asked how he thought Garoppolo did in the waning minutes of the first half when he spiked the ball after taking a sack to give Stephen Gostkowski a chance for a 56-yard field goal.
?I thought all things considered, he did a pretty good job with it,” he said. ” But given the fact we were out of timeouts with 20-some seconds ? I forget what it was, like 25 seconds or something like that when he got sacked ? we were trying to run a third down play, which we would have needed to get out of bounds on because we were out of timeouts. And then when the clock wound down and it was apparent that if we had snapped the ball and run a normal play, we probably would have run out of time, so we would?ve had to score a touchdown on the play or the half would have been over. I think Jimmy did a good job to recognize that situation. Whether we should or shouldn?t have been in it, that?s really not the point. The point is once it came up, I thought he handled it well.”
Belichick also acknowledged there is still plenty of work to be done for Garoppolo and the rest of the team.
?Obviously, there are a lot of things we could work on [when] you get sacked seven times ? that and throwing for interceptions,” he said. “We could protect better. We could certainly do a better job of getting open and giving the quarterback somewhere to throw, times we could make quicker decisions in terms of gett