Patriots' coaches talk decision-making, offensive execution, and end-of-game situation vs. Steelers

Three takeaways from Tuesday’s conference calls with Bill Belichick and Josh McDaniels:

1. Belichick still has full faith in Tom Brady’s decision-making capabilities.

This doesn’t come as a big shock, but on the heels of a pair of games where the veteran quarterback committed a pair of sizable errors with the Patriots near the opposing end zone, it needs to be mentioned.



Against the Dolphins, Brady said he lost track of timeouts on one possession, which ultimately resulted in a sack and a fundamentally blown possession at the end of the first half. And against the Steelers, a late pick on an ill-advised ball off his back foot ended with an interception, and a series of late passes to the end zone on New England’s final drive couldn’t find their targets. It has all left the quarterback open to second-guessing over the last week-plus.

On Tuesday, Belichick backed Brady’s decision-making, regardless of the situation, saying he “would certainly not second-guess” the quarterback in the type of situations he faced against the Steelers.

“Nobody knows better at that time, with the ball in his hands, where he feels like he’s got the best chance,” Belichick said of Brady. “If we complete a pass and the clock’s running and how much time that’s going to take and what we have left, that’s a split-second decision that he’s got to make. I don’t think anybody will make it better than him. You can second-guess it all you want, but that’s the person we have doing that and we have great confidence in him doing that.

“It’s a tough situation,” Belchick added. “I don’t know if there’s a great answer when you don’t have much time and you have to throw to the end zone or you maybe marginally have enough time to throw it somewhere else if you can’t get out of bounds. And so, the defense has a big advantage in that situation. They played it well, and we weren’t able to get in the end zone.”

2. When it came to the play-calling on the final drive against Pittsburgh, McDaniels sounds like a guy who at least understands the criticism regarding what happened.

“Whenever we don’t finish the drive, it’s never good. You can put that right on me,” he said flatly. “Obviously, I didn’t do well enough at the very completion of the drive. I thought we were doing really well moving the ball. We got it into the scoring zone quick enough that we didn’t have to do anything dramatic, and I think we made it to the 10 or 11-yard line.

“Whenever you have any kind of negative situations, it kind of resets the whole scenario. We had a penalty there, and it put us in a situation that’s a little bit longer yardage obviously in that scenario,” he added. “(But) I have to do a good job. I have to do a better job than we did at the end of the drive to get that thing in the end zone and to give our team a chance to win the game. Hopefully, I’ll learn from that one as best I can, and try to apply it here going forward next week.”

3. McDaniels says don’t read too much into the fact Cordarrelle Patterson was on the field for the last play against the Steelers and not Josh Gordon.

Asked what went into the decision to swap out Gordon for Patterson, McDaniels said his goal was to get a “fresh guy” in the game at that juncture.

“We had just kind of run quite a few plays in a row. I know there was a timeout there before that (and) both of those guys have worked at that spot and in that type of a situation,” he said. “Based on what we were doing, we made the choice to go with (Patterson) at that point – no ulterior motive on that at all. Just put a fresh guy in to go in there and do something on the last play to see if we could get into the end zone, and it is what it is.”