Bill Belichick Quotes

There is an old saying about the strength of the wolf is the pack, and I think there is a lot of truth to that. On a football team, it’s not the strength of the individual players, but it is the strength of the unit and how they all function together.

If you sit back & spend too much time feeling good about what you did in the past, you're going to come up short next time

Talent sets the floor, character sets the ceiling

Mental Toughness is doing the right thing for the team when it's not the best thing for you.

For a team to accomplish their goal, everybody’s got to give up a little bit of their individuality.

There are no shortcuts to building a team each season. You build the foundation brick by brick.

To live in the past is to die in the present.

I don't Twitter, I don't MyFace, I don't Yearbook...

You get the job done or you don't.

You definitely go through a stage, most coaches do, where you see a good player and you get enamored, you really like what the player does, but then when you put him into your system, it's not quite the same player that he was in another system. He has some strengths, but you cant utilize all those strengths. If you try to utilize all his strengths, you end up weakening a lot of other players who are already in your system.

My personal coaching philosophy, my mentality, has always been to make things as difficult as possible for players in practice, however bad we can make them, I make them.

The less versatile you are, the better you have to be at what you do well.

You can play hard. You can play aggressive. You can give 120% but if one guy is out of position then someone is running through the line of scrimmage and he is going to gain a bunch of yards.

I think that we'll continue to try to look at ourselves in the mirror and see where we can do a better job, maybe where we can improve the process. But I think the fundamentals of the process will remain the same.

When you get wet, it usually means something good.

Whatever success I've had it is because I've tried to understand the situation of the player. I think the coach's duty is to avoid complicating matters.

We're always trying to do a better job on that and that's what we'll continue to do.

In short, we accumulate all the information that we can accumulate, wherever that information comes from, and try to analyze it and make the best decision we can make for our football team on a case-by-case basis. It's the same for every single player; the process is the same.

I don't think there's anybody in this organization not focused on the 49ers...I mean Chargers.

I'm a football coach. I'm not a doctor ... They don't call plays, I don't do surgeries. We have a great deal here.

I am who I am. In the end, I feel that what I'm accountable for is doing a good job as a football coach.

We'll continue to work hard to do a better job in every area going forward. I don't know where those little things will come from but we'll continue to be diligent on them.

It's time for the New England Patriots to move on and that's what our job is. And as I said, our goal is the same: to have a winning football team, to be a pillar in the community. That's what our direction is; that's what we're going to do.

I think a smart guy can learn. Some guys learn - it's just like all of us - some guys can learn electronics, some of us can't. Some people can learn something else, some of us can't. I mean, we're all wired differently.

I think everyone is a case-by-case basis. Whatever the circumstances are that come with any individual, they exist and you have to make a determination as to what your comfort level is with that person and the characteristics that they bring.

I'll refrain from making any more comments on any ongoing people involved in the judicial process.

My overall knowledge of football specifications, the overall process that happens on game day with the footballs is very limited. I would say that during the course of the game, I honestly never - it probably has happened on an incomplete pass or something - but I've never touched a game ball. It's not something I have any familiarity with on that.

I cannot comment on any player who has ongoing criminal charges and legal situations.

I'm not really worried about the other 31 teams.

That has never been a priority for me and I want the players to deal with a harder situation in practice than they'll ever have to deal with in the game. Maybe that's part of our ball security philosophy.

We're not polishing fine china here.

We have absolutely done as much work as we can on finding out things like that and we'll try to get all the information that we can as that would apply to any current situation, which I can't talk about.

I think it's relatively easy to play defense against a team that can only do one thing. Unfortunately, that's not what we're talking about here with Seattle. They have a great running back - they have a great group of running backs - but Lynch obviously is really kind of in a class by himself. The quarterback's a problem, the receivers are a problem, they have a good offensive line.

I obviously understand that each team has the opportunity to prepare the balls the way they want, give them to the officials and the game officials either approve or disapprove the balls. That really was the end of it for me until I learned a little bit more about this .

It hasn't even been competitive. That's the first thing we're going to have to do is just find a way to stay competitive because these (first two games) have been over by halftime. We saw that last year too (on Halloween). It was 21-3 (Steelers) at the end of the first quarter.

This is the end of this subject for me for a long time.

The linebacker has to make multiple, multiple decisions on every play. Not only what his assignment is and what the play is, but all the way along the line, different angles, how to take on blocks, how to tackle, the leverage to play with, the angle to run to and so forth, the technique. So many different things happen in a split second during the course of the play, just like it is for a quarterback. The more of those things that you can do right, slow down, get the most important things, not get distracted by all the stuff that's happening, but just really zero in on a target.

Some guys are football smart and they're not smart in other ways. Other guys get 1500 on their SATs and can't get a double-team block right. No, that definitely, in my experience, sometimes it correlates, sometimes it doesn't. I don't think you just take it for granted.

I feel like I've had a strong relationship with Robert [Kraft] and his family since I was here in 1996 and I think it's gotten stronger every year that I've been here with the Patriots. The more things we do together, talk about together, work together on, the closer we become and the more we rely on each other. I feel like our relationship is very close and continues to grow closer every year as we grow older together.

The only thing I can cheer for in Philadelphia is the national anthem.

Well this week's all about Seattle, so we've been doing our best to prepare for the Seahawks. I'm doing that, our team's doing that and we'll be ready to go Sunday. That's our focus.

We've been cooperative with the NFL investigation. We'll continue to do so and we will turn all our attention and focus on to the Seattle Seahawks, a very well coached, talented, tough, competitive football team.

I've learned a lot about the process. I had no idea how the balls got from the officials locker room down on the field and so forth and so on and all of that. That's not something I have ever thought or concerned myself about [on] game day. I've concerned myself with preparing and coaching the team.

I think a good quarterback or a good linebacker, a good safety, even though you have a lot of bodies moving out there, it slows down for them and they can really see it. Then there are other guys that it's a lot of guys moving and they don't see anything. It's like being at a busy intersection, just cars going everywhere. The guys that can really sort it out, they see the game at a slower pace and can really sort out and decipher all that movement, which is hard. But experience certainly helps that, yes.

It's the business that you guys are in too. We try to get as much information as we can and make the best decisions that we can for the football team.

All sources are not equal. When you get information, you take the information, you evaluate it, and you do the best you can with it. So, there's a variance in the quality and the amount of the information. It's a case-by-case basis. Each one's different. There's no set formulas.

I told you the one change we would make in the initial start level of the football pressure, but that's really about it.

I'm trying to coach the team and that's what I want to do.

Each decision will be done on a case-by-case basis and we'll make the decision we feel is best for the New England Patriots football team.

I think we all know that quarterbacks, kickers, specialists have certain preferences on footballs. They know a lot more about it than I do. They're a lot more sensitive to it than I am.