Bill Belichick Addresses On Patriots Signing Antonio Brown

Patriots head coach Bill Belichick doesn’t like getting questions about his players. Well, he doesn’t like answering questions at all. That’s exactly what happened during his conference call with reporters. One of them asked the head coach about Antonio Brown.

“We have no official transaction so I wouldn’t comment on any player that’s not on our team,” coach Belichick said.

Well, he didn’t have to say anything, because he has talked about Brown a lot throughout his career.

In 2015, he discussed Brown’s skills after he went off for 133 yards on nine catches and a touchdown in the Steeler’s loss to the Patriots. 

“It won’t get much tougher than that,” Belichick said. “Antonio is really a good player that’s good in the deep part of the field, he’s good on catch and run plays – the screens they try to throw to him and the under routes and stuff like that and the intermediate routes. He ran a real good route on a double move. I think it was a good battle.” 

Brown’s skills fueled Belichick’s creativity. He used double-coverage at him or just used Stephon Gilmore and other All-Pros in one-on-one coverage.

“(He’s) very difficult,” Belichick said at a midweek press conference in 2016. “He’s got a tremendous skill set, very quick. He almost always can create separation in his route. He’s a very good technique route-runner so he does a great job of setting up routes. He does a really good job of getting on top of the (defensive backs) almost stepping on the toes before he goes into his route so they can’t get any kind of — they can’t really anticipate it. He does a great job of stacking the defenders where he gets a step on the defender then he kind of cuts him off so that the defenders like a full man behind him so he can use his body to protect the ball on the deep balls. He’s hard to jam on the line because of his great quickness and then as I said, when he gets that half a step on the defender, not that he necessarily outruns everybody on the field, but once he moves in front of them and stacks them then he is on top of them.

“The skills with the ball in his hand as a runner are exceptional,” Belichick added. “You see that on the punt returns. You see it on a lot of those under routes, catch-and-run plays, so you don’t want to back off of him and let him catch it and break a tackle or if you get up on him he runs behind you. That’s a problem and he’s a good intermediate route runner, too; in-cuts, comebacks, curls, things like that. He has great quickness coming out of cuts so he’s very, very hard to cover. And he’s seen a lot of double-coverage, too. I don’t think that really bothers him either. He knows how to beat that. When you double him I mean at some point he attacks one guy so it really becomes single coverage. He takes the other guy out of it and then he beats that guy. So he’s tough. He’s really tough.” 

A year later, he used a few simple words to describe Brown.

“Everything,” he said when asked about what makes Brown this great. “Just make a list. He’s on all of it.”

In 2018, Belichick praised Brown and Juju Smith-Schuster.

“They’ve got a lot of other guys, too, but I mean, these two receivers are elite — elite, elite.”