New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick wasn’t interested in addressing the future on Sunday morning, approximately 12 hours after his team was unceremoniously bounced from the postseason.
So, while acknowledging the elephant in the room with regard to the status of Tom Brady, Belichick said that now is not the time to address the superstar quarterback’s future with the franchise.
Belichick said that Brady is “an iconic figure in this organization,” and that “nobody respects Tom more than I do,” before shifting gears to say that the future was not going to be the topic of the day.
Members of the media predictably asked questions regarding the 42-year-old quarterback, who is scheduled to become a free agent on March 18.
Belichick, in his predictable way, did his best to move on from the subject.
“I’m sure there are a lot of questions about the future. Nobody has thought about the future,” he said.
When one reporter elected to press on with his line of questioning, Belichick appeared to get a bit testy.
“Honestly, look, I know it’s out there just like there are a lot of other things out there,” Belichick said. “We could bring up 50 questions just like that one. I told you what my state is on that. So you can ask all 50 of them and it’s going to be the same answer 50 times.
“We’ve been working on Tennessee, it’s 12 hours after the game, I’m not going to talk a lot of things about the future because I’m not prepared to talk about it.”
Belichick, however, did return to the topic by saying that any decisions will be done so in a collaborative manner.
“I want to give the proper attention and communication and detail and thought into my input into those decisions,” he said.
“But any decision made is not an individual decision. There are other people involved. There has be some type of communication, understanding, agreement, whatever you want to call it. That’s not a one-way street. I hope you can understand that. One person can’t just decide what everybody else is going to do. …
“There’s a lot of time, thought and effort and communication that goes into that. Now is not the time.”
Belichick’s comments come on the heels of Brady telling reporters that it was “unlikely” that he would retire following the Patriots’ 20-13 loss to the Titans in the AFC wild-card game.
Brady otherwise declined to speculate about his future.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I’m not going to predict it,” Brady said on Saturday. “No one needs to make choices at this point. I love playing football. I love playing for this team. I’ve loved playing for this team for two decades and winning a lot of games. Again, I don’t know what it looks like moving forward, so we’ll just take it day by day.”
Brady finished the regular season having completed 60.8 percent of his passes for 4,057 yards, 24 touchdowns and eight interceptions. His completion percentage was his lowest mark since 2013, and his yards-per-attempt average (6.6) was his lowest since 2002. Brady missed out on a Pro Bowl selection for the first time since 2008, when he tore his ACL in Week 1.
A sixth-round pick in 2000, Brady has 74,571 passing yards, 541 touchdown passes and 179 interceptions in 285 career games (283 starts). He ranks behind only Drew Brees on the all-time lists for yardage (77,416) and touchdowns (547).
