Bill Belichick speaks on his confidence level in the offense

BOSTON — All throughout training camp, the major story line hovering over the Patriots has been simple: The offense does not look good. At all.

To a certain degree, some growing pains were to be expected. Josh McDaniels left town, and the two top coaches on the offensive side of the ball are Matt Patricia and Joe Judge, neither of whom have ever run an offense before. With a second-year quarterback under center and a new system to implement, the early showings on the practice field have generated some concern in the region.

With the first preseason game set for Thursday night, and with the regular season now almost exactly one month away, head coach Bill Belichick was asked a simple question on Monday: What is your confidence level in the offense right now?

“Every day is a challenge. We just try to build on yesterday and do what we can do today to get better and then build on it tomorrow,” Belichick said. “At different points in time, we kind of take stock in where we are and decide whether we want to add more in this area or add more in that area or whatever it happens to be. And so we try to do the things that we think are most important, most necessary that will help us win. So that’s just kind of what we do.”

Belichick then opened up a bit regarding the team’s philosophy on installing elements.

“That’s not really a — you know, you can get everything in and not execute it well, or you can get in less and hopefully do it better. That’s usually the way it works. Or there’s somewhere in between. I’d say usually we fall somewhere in between,” he said. “You don’t get in everything we want, but we feel like the things that we can do, at least we’re doing it at a competitive level. I’m not saying it’s great, but at least we can go out there and do it. So, we’ll see.”

Later in his press conference, Belichick was asked a general question about whether he would ever completely scrap an element that is just not working.

“Sure. Yeah. In camp. In preseason. During the season. Midseason. Yeah, I think you see things that are going well and you try to figure out a way to maybe exploit that more, do more of it. And when you see things that aren’t going well, you try to figure out a way to improve it or get rid of it and move onto something else that’s more productive,” he shared. “So you have a couple of different options there, you just have to decide which one is the right one for that. If you’re spending time on something that’s not productive, then you need to change it or find something else. It’s just not efficient.”

Belichick was then asked a follow-up question about the difficulty of making a decision to scrap an element after a lot of time and effort has been poured in to trying to make it work.

“I think that’s part of it. Like, everything’s not gonna work out perfectly. And again, we have a lot of — at certain positions — we have a number of new players, and we’ll have to see how they adapt and kind of find out what things they’re good at and what things maybe we need to do less of, what things we need to do more of. So I think we’re finding out, certainly with the rookies and the younger players but also some players that we’ve added to the team. That’s a process. Sometimes it takes a while,” he said. “But ultimately you have to make that judgment. And sometimes you make it sooner rather than later. But it’s, I’m not really worried too much about all of that right now. I mean we have a lot of balls in the air, we’re trying to get ready for the Giants [preseason] game, we’re trying to get ready to evaluate players, we’re trying to work against each other so we can get high quality work rather than just running the plays from another team. So there’s a lot of things going on there that will all come together in some kind of jigsaw puzzle. It’s not just one thing.”

This was, quite obviously, not Bill Belichick’s first press conference. If he didn’t want to discuss any of that, he could have given a terse 10-word answer before looking around for the next question. He’s likely been kept apprised that the local media has begun wondering if the Patriots will scrap the offensive plan altogether, given the early returns.

It’s interesting, then, that Belichick did decide to get so expansive on the thought process involved behind the scenes.

What exactly it means is hard to predict. But another shaky offensive showing followed on the practice field on Monday, and the world will get to see that offense in live action on Thursday night. While Belichick didn’t speak specifically on his thinking with this current offensive plan, he said enough to suggest that if the team needs to make a major overhaul in one area, doing so will remain a possibility.