After losing to the Giants, the Patriots are 2-9 and might be the league’s worst team. Does Belichick have the ability to fix it anymore?
— Bill Belichick was done. He had been asked 22 questions over four minutes and muttered his way through them with brief answers about how everyone on his struggling team had been told to be ready to play. He didn’t want any more. So he softly put his right hand down like a gavel, abruptly ending his postgame news conference.
The 71-year-old coach exited down a tunnel and took a right turn past the football field at MetLife Stadium, where his New England Patriots had just lost 10-7 to a backup, undrafted rookie quarterback and a New York Giants team that had been among the NFL’s worst.
Three months into a dysfunctional season, there’s no sense in ignoring the obvious. After nine losses in 11 games and with a quarterback situation that is turning this once-proud franchise into a laughingstock, Belichick is out of answers. The tricks and stunts he has pulled haven’t worked. His team hasn’t responded. His roster stinks. And his explanations for how it got this bad are even worse.
“I told everybody to be ready to go,” Belichick said four different times.
All of this, of course, leads to the uncomfortable question that’s going to hover over the final six games this season. Is Belichick going to be back? Are these the final games of a brilliant career, one that’s ending with an implosion that once seemed unfathomable?
What question could be more important than that after watching the product put forth by Belichick’s team Sunday? He tried something different this week, an attempt to jump-start a feeble offense that’s dragging this team down. Belichick decided not to name a starting quarterback. He let Mac Jones and Bailey Zappe get practice reps with the starting offense, hoping one of them would be so good that a decision would be made for him.
Instead, it was yet another Belichick decision (or indecision?) that backfired for this team. Belichick is the same coach who in 2001 explained Tom Brady getting practice reps over Drew Bledsoe by saying that a team can’t split up those sessions with multiple quarterbacks because they’re too valuable — that missing any snaps hinders the starting QB’s preparation.
