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http://www.csnne.com/new-england-pa...-banged-patriots?p=ya5nbcs&ocid=yahoo&ref=yfp
FOXBORO -- The Patriots are doing what they can to mitigate what ails them, and as they prepare for their Week 10 game against the Giants they have dialed back the intensity of this week's practices to lighten the physical load that players are asked to bear.
The team held a walkthrough on a Wednesday and held a shells-and-shorts practice on Thursday. With only Friday's practice session remaining -- which is typically the least physically strenuous practice of the week -- it appears as though the Patriots will go without a single fully-padded practice leading up to their ninth game of the year.
Part of the reason for that, as coach Bill Belichick explained during a press conference on Friday morning, was because he and his staff gauge how the team is feeling and determine the shape of their practices based off of that.
With only five healthy offensive linemen on the 53-man roster and one of the team's top defensive playmakers, linebacker Jamie Collins, dealing with an illness, it may have seemed prudent to allow players to focus on recovery this week.
"It's not the same for everybody," Belichick said. "Where one guy is, or sometimes even where a group is, sometimes you have another group that's in the exact opposite place. One group maybe needs a little more recovery, another group maybe needs a little more work. I'd say we go through that throughout the year. Happens in training camp sometimes because of numbers or experience levels and so forth.
"Bottom line is you try to do what you feel is best for the team. You have to take individuals into consideration but you have to take the team into consideration too. Can't structure things for one or two guys and be negligent to the other 61, including practice squad players. We try to balance that the best we can. It's not always the same for everybody.
Sometimes the guys who need more work, we try to get them more work. But we have to try to get the team ready, and that encompasses all those things."
That hasn't always been the case. When Belichick came into the league, the practice schedules were traditionally pretty rigid. If players were dinged up and had a long stretch of games ahead of them -- as the Patriots do now given that their bye week came in Week 4 -- that didn't necessarily mean the course of a given day's practice was altered.
"When I was younger, a lot of times my job for several years there was to write up the practice schedule," Belichick said. "We'd meet and go through the schedule and I'd write it up, put in what everybody was doing and hand copies of that to all the coaches. We have coaches on our staff now who do that. I remember I could've written a practice schedule for a Wednesday in December in July. Easily. And there wouldn't be one thing that was different.
"A lot of times it was, 'OK, what did we do last Thursday.' And it was the exact same thing. But that's not the way we do it. I'm not saying it was wrong to do it that way, but sometimes certain coaches [and] programs I've been in, that's just the routine. Same thing every Wednesday, every Thursday, every Friday, every Saturday so you kind of always know where you are. You always know, we do blitz pickup even though the other team hadn't blitzed in two years or vice versa.
"We kind of do it differently [now]. We kind of talk each day about what the team needs. We have a basic structure of this is what we do, but we change that depending on what our needs are. That's definitely a big part of it is the health and the overall readiness of the team. That's very subjective obviously, but we do the best we can in consultation with the training staff, the strength and conditioning staff, position coaches a lot of times they have a good tempo of where their individual group or particular players are. Sometimes that affects the rest of the preparation."
FOXBORO -- The Patriots are doing what they can to mitigate what ails them, and as they prepare for their Week 10 game against the Giants they have dialed back the intensity of this week's practices to lighten the physical load that players are asked to bear.
The team held a walkthrough on a Wednesday and held a shells-and-shorts practice on Thursday. With only Friday's practice session remaining -- which is typically the least physically strenuous practice of the week -- it appears as though the Patriots will go without a single fully-padded practice leading up to their ninth game of the year.
Part of the reason for that, as coach Bill Belichick explained during a press conference on Friday morning, was because he and his staff gauge how the team is feeling and determine the shape of their practices based off of that.
With only five healthy offensive linemen on the 53-man roster and one of the team's top defensive playmakers, linebacker Jamie Collins, dealing with an illness, it may have seemed prudent to allow players to focus on recovery this week.
"It's not the same for everybody," Belichick said. "Where one guy is, or sometimes even where a group is, sometimes you have another group that's in the exact opposite place. One group maybe needs a little more recovery, another group maybe needs a little more work. I'd say we go through that throughout the year. Happens in training camp sometimes because of numbers or experience levels and so forth.
"Bottom line is you try to do what you feel is best for the team. You have to take individuals into consideration but you have to take the team into consideration too. Can't structure things for one or two guys and be negligent to the other 61, including practice squad players. We try to balance that the best we can. It's not always the same for everybody.
Sometimes the guys who need more work, we try to get them more work. But we have to try to get the team ready, and that encompasses all those things."
That hasn't always been the case. When Belichick came into the league, the practice schedules were traditionally pretty rigid. If players were dinged up and had a long stretch of games ahead of them -- as the Patriots do now given that their bye week came in Week 4 -- that didn't necessarily mean the course of a given day's practice was altered.
"When I was younger, a lot of times my job for several years there was to write up the practice schedule," Belichick said. "We'd meet and go through the schedule and I'd write it up, put in what everybody was doing and hand copies of that to all the coaches. We have coaches on our staff now who do that. I remember I could've written a practice schedule for a Wednesday in December in July. Easily. And there wouldn't be one thing that was different.
"A lot of times it was, 'OK, what did we do last Thursday.' And it was the exact same thing. But that's not the way we do it. I'm not saying it was wrong to do it that way, but sometimes certain coaches [and] programs I've been in, that's just the routine. Same thing every Wednesday, every Thursday, every Friday, every Saturday so you kind of always know where you are. You always know, we do blitz pickup even though the other team hadn't blitzed in two years or vice versa.
"We kind of do it differently [now]. We kind of talk each day about what the team needs. We have a basic structure of this is what we do, but we change that depending on what our needs are. That's definitely a big part of it is the health and the overall readiness of the team. That's very subjective obviously, but we do the best we can in consultation with the training staff, the strength and conditioning staff, position coaches a lot of times they have a good tempo of where their individual group or particular players are. Sometimes that affects the rest of the preparation."
