|
| New England Patriots football head coach Bill Belichick speaks during an NFL football news conference at Gillette Stadium, Saturday, Jan. 24, 2015, in Foxborough, Mass., where he defended the way his team preps its game balls. |
FOXBOROUGH, Mass.
(AP) -- Saying his team "followed every rule to the letter," New
England Patriots coach Bill Belichick described in detail how his team
prepares its footballs on game day and defended his players from chatter
that they made it to the Super Bowl by cheating.
"At
no time was there any intent whatsoever to try to compromise the
integrity of the game or to gain an advantage," Belichick said in an
unscheduled availability on Saturday afternoon, eight days before the
Patriots will play the Seattle Seahawks for the NFL championship.
"Quite
the opposite: we feel like we followed the rules of the game to the
letter," he said. "We try to do everything right. We err on the side of
caution. It's been that way now for many years. Anything that's close,
we stay as far away from the line as we can."
Speaking
once again with authority on a topic he previously professed ignorance
of, Belichick said the team conducted an internal study on the process
of getting game balls ready.
Most of the steps
are designed to make them tackier, which has a noticeable effect on how
it feels, he said, but the process could also affect the pressure
inside the ball, which is harder to tell by touch.
"I'm
not a scientist. I'm not an expert in footballs; I'm not an expert in
football measurements," Belichick said. "I'm just telling you what I
know."
The Patriots reached the Super Bowl for
the sixth time in Belichick's tenure when they beat the Colts 45-7 in
the AFC championship game on Sunday. But later that night, Indianapolis
TV station WTHR reported that some of the game balls provided by New
England for the use of its offense weren't sufficiently inflated.
The
NFL said its initial investigation confirmed that some of the footballs
used in the first half of the conference title game were underinflated.
On Thursday, Belichick deferred questions on the game balls to Brady;
the quarterback also denied any impropriety.
But
in the slow news off-days before Super Bowl week, the allegations
received disproportionate attention - and Twitter hashtags such as
"Deflategate" and "Ballghazi" - along with comparisons to the
videotaping scandal of 2007, when the Patriots were hit with
unprecedented penalties after Belichick was caught recording opposing
coaches sending in signals from the sidelines.
Belichick denied that there is a pattern of rule-breaking, or even of pushing the rules to their limit.
"It
was wrong. We were disciplined for it. That's it. We never did it
again. We're never going to do it again," Belichick said of the scandal
that came to be known as "Spygate." "And anything else that's close,
we're not going to do either."
A football
lifer who only seems happy on the sidelines, if at all, Belichick is
known for an absolute attention to detail that prepares his team for
every imaginable situation.
But instead of
getting ready for the Super Bowl, he said he has spent far too much time
the past week studying the science and learning about "bladders, air
gauges, stitching, pressure, game day football preparation, rubdowns and
so forth."
"I'm embarrassed to talk about the
amount of time that I've put into this relative to the other important
challenge in front of us," he said. "It sounds simple, and I'm not
trying to say that we're trying to land a guy on the moon, but there are
a lot of things here that are a little hard to get a handle on."
But
Belichick seemed most emotional when he came to the defense of his
team. Among the questions he and his players have been asked this week
is whether they cheated to get to the Super Bowl.
Belichick
praised his players, who went 12-4 in the regular season, won an 11th
division title in 12 years, made a fourth straight trip - and ninth
overall - to the conference championship game, and have a chance for a
fourth NFL title in his tenure.
"They're a
physically and mentally tough team that works hard, that trains hard,
that prepares hard and have met every challenge that I put in front of
them," he said.
"This team was the best team
in the AFC in the regular season. ... The best team in the postseason,
that's what this team is. I know that because I've been with them every
day. And I'm proud of this team."
No comments:
Post a Comment