Super Bowl XXXVI

Q & A with Patriots head coach Bill Belichick

Jan. 31, 2002

Q: Why did you bring so many former Jets players with you to New England?

A: It’s a little bit overstated in thinking that an objective when you take a job is to hurry up and bring as many players as you can from the place that you left. What I would say is that when you get into a new situation and you have a need on your team and you’re considering two or three guys for that need, because of the familiarity and because the player knows your system, you have a tendency to go with the guy you know and who knows you. I think it happens more that way than "Gee, I want to try to get six guys from that team." That’s not really the thought process. I think a good example of that for us this year was Fred Coleman. We had some problems at receiver. A couple of guys got hurt and then Terry (Glenn’s) situation and we brought in three or four receivers. I can’t sit here and tell you that Fred Coleman was better than all the other guys. But what we did know about Fred was that he was tough and dependable. Charley (Weis), Scott Pioli and myself had seen him in practice for over a year and we had seen him in training camp and we knew what he could do, he knew our system, it was in the middle of the season and we felt like he could come in and probably contribute quicker than some of the other people we had. That’s not to say that the other guys aren’t going to be good football players or that they couldn’t contribute somewhere else. But at that point in time, Fred was probably just a little bit better fit for us. It wasn’t so much that he was an ex-Jet as it was that we were familiar with him.

Q: Are you impressed with Mike Martz’s ability to call a game?

A: I think Mike has as good of an offensive attack as I’ve seen in this league. When you talk about all the coaches that I’ve had the opportunity to compete against, both in recent years and even going back into the 1980s with (Joe) Gibbs and (Tom) Landry and Bill Walsh, I would put Martz right up there with all of them. He’s a very good play caller and his teams use a lot of different formations and motion. They give you a lot of different looks, but they really know what they are doing and he really knows how to break you down defensively. He gives you a lot of problems. You come out of the game, or even at halftime, and you know what he’s going after. You know where he sees your weaknesses and you’re sitting there trying to plug it up. And then after you get that fixed and you go to another series, you can see where Mike has already moved on. He sees where you tried to support that area and now he’s on to the other area that you’ve weakened in order to compensate. I think he’s an excellent game day coach and I have a lot of respect for Mike Martz. But I have even more respect for him after playing against him earlier in the year in Foxboro. I thought, and I told him this after the game which I may regret doing now, that they really gave us a lot of problems. I thought he had a real good game plan against us and I wasn’t happy to see that because I think it shows other teams some ideas in places to attack us where we really hadn’t been attacked.

Q: What does it say about the state of the NFL that the Patriots can make the Super Bowl a year after finishing with a 5-11 record?

A: The biggest thing I could say is that at the end of last year, we took a good look at our team, spent a lot of time evaluating it, listed our needs and listed the type of players we would want to fill those needs. We also looked at ourselves organizationally as a coaching staff and looked at the areas we needed to improve. Then we tried to address those areas where we didn’t feel like we were performing the way we wanted to perform. That’s just trying to improve your team and that’s the way we went about it. I don’t know if that’s a one-year process or a two-year process or whatever. We’ll do the same thing this year. Everybody else is going to get better, so how are we going to get better?

The Archives
2001 - 2002 Season