Bill Belichick Q&A: Charlotte Game Week Presser

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — The anticipation that had built up heading into this debut year for coach Bill Belichick at Carolina came to a screeching halt, following a season-opening dud on Monday night. 

>>> Welcome to the new home of Inside Carolina! Reactivate your account for $1 <<<

The highly-anticipated opener went awry for UNC, with TCU thumping the Tar Heels 48-14 at Kenan Stadium. It’s the most points ever allowed by a Belichick-led team — more than any outing across his 511 games coached in the NFL. Now, Carolina looks to tackle a short week, regrouping and turning around from Monday’s season opener to Saturday, when it travels to play at Charlotte.

Here are the key points from Belichick’s weekly availability with the media on Wednesday inside the Kenan Football Center. Also, scroll down for the full video for the interview …

Opening Statement

“It’s a quick turnaround for us this week. Think the guys have really embraced the short week, and we’re going as fast as we can to put the TCU game behind us and move on here to Charlotte. As far as Charlotte goes, they’re probably feeling about the same as we did. They were in a really competitive game late in the second quarter, kind of as we were. And then it got away from a little bit against App State, kind of like our game did against TCU. So both teams will be looking to rebound off of last week’s games. This is a team that, again, has a lot of new faces, new coaching staff. We certainly looked at a lot of what they’ve done. (What) coach (Tim) Albin has done at Ohio and some of the coaches that came with them from there, but they’ve also put together a staff that has some people that weren’t from Ohio. It’s a little bit to take in a shorter time span, but we knew what the schedule was, so we did some work on these guys in the off season as well. They have a really explosive returner in (Henry) Rutledge, he probably is one of the best ones that we face this year. Obviously, (Conner) Harrell, you know, quarterback. We know about him and the offense.

“So similar to some of the things that TCU did in terms of running no temp, no huddle and tempo, and getting to play from the sideline based on the defensive looks, things like that. A lot of 11 personnel, similar to what TCU did, not the same, but similar. And then defensively, this is a disruptive defense. They really try to knock the offense back with negative plays, pressure, a lot of stunting up front, and so they just try to cause disruption, and they do a good job of that, and get you into some long yardage situations. … Overall, a good, well-balanced team that’s picking up a new system and kind of finding their way.”

Coming out of the film review from TCU, what were your biggest points of emphasis to the team?

“Give TCU credit. That’s a good football team, and they played well. But a lot of our problems are self-inflicted.The turnovers, we have two turnovers from touchdowns, defensively couldn’t convert on a couple of third longs. Gave a couple long runs that were just not well defended. So our special teams weren’t particularly good either. Short punt and drop snap and so forth, block field goal or blocked Extra Point. You know, we’re lucky on that one. So just kind of in every area, things that we need to we need to tighten up. And as I said, TCU was a really good football team. I think that some of our deficiencies got exposed, and we’ll address them and hopefully get them to a level that is a competitive level they need to be at.”

What did you see from Gio Lopez when you watched the TCU film? What is his status for this weekend?

“I talked to Gio this morning, he’s doing pretty good. We all have plays we’d like to have back from the game. Calls, plays, passes, tackles, you name it. You can’t participate in a game like that and not feel like there’s some things you could have done better, you’d like to do over again. So learn from those. Move on and get ready for Charlotte. And that’s all we can control. We need to learn some lessons from what happened in the TCU game, but at the same time, there’s nothing you can do about that one. It’s over with. And we need to move on. We’ll see how it goes. We haven’t practiced yet this week, so we’ll see what things look like today when we get out there.”

Your team seemed to struggle getting pass rush against TCU. What’s your philosophy when it comes to blitzing with this group, and do you think you’ll have to bring more gives to get consistent pressure?

“It’s always hard to talk about rushing the passer when you’re behind. It’s a lot easier to rush a pass than when you’re ahead. You get into a bunch of pass rush schemes when you’re behind and they don’t throw the ball, then you just expose yourself to running plays and different gap blocking schemes and so forth. That might not necessarily be good against some of those pass blitzes. So look, the best pass rush is when you know they’re going to pass, and if you can dictate those situations, and then that’s when you should be able to put your best forward in terms of individual pass rushes. And also, scheme rushes based on their protection schemes. So when you’re not playing from behind, you don’t get as many chances to rush a pass, or you have to make them count. But even when you think you have them, they don’t really have to throw because of the score situation.”

With so many new players, how much are you still in the evaluation process with this team?

“I think some players are pretty well established. I think there’s others that kind of are trying to figure out what their roles are, and that could change from game to game, regardless of what their skills are. Could be just the way we’re playing the game or what we’re doing in particular, the game plan, strategy for that week. So there are a lot of roles that are still evolving on the team. Yes, no question about it, that’ll probably continue for a while. Again, I always felt like in the NFL, you need about a third of the season, so call it five to six games, to really know what your team really is. So we’re probably looking at four or five games before we feel real good about the best group we can put out there.

“I think we put the best people we can out there right now. But that may change. And it could certainly change when some of the players get more comfortable, get a little more playing time, gain more confidence. I just have to see how that goes. But clearly, some players have established themselves as the best players at their position, and I wouldn’t expect any changes there.”

You finally had the chance to see your team go up against someone else. What intel about your team did you gain from that?

“Yeah, as I said, some of our deficiencies were certainly exposed by TCU. There were other things that were pretty competitive. We need to shore up the things we need to shore up. And overall, just some fundamental execution of just basic football, snaps and catching the ball and tackling and finishing blocks and getting to the proper depth on pass routes. All those things that are not we’ve done before. We know how to do them. We didn’t do them consistently enough in the game. We need to be better with that.”