Belichick On Zo & Bertrand: Trading Garoppolo 'Very Difficult,' But That's Business
BOSTON (CBS) -- The Patriots made a surprising move this week to ship backup quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo off to San Francisco in exchange for a second-round pick.
Patriots head coach Bill Belichick joined Zolak & Bertrand on Wednesday to promote his upcoming Hall Of Fame Huddle, which will take place Thursday night at the Seaport World Trade Center, and to discuss the Garoppolo trade.
"Very difficult," Belichick said. "It was complex on a lot of levels. And in the end, just tried to do the best we could. It's something that's kind of been ongoing. It's not like this creeped up on us yesterday. Wherever you look at it from, if you go back a couple of years, there are different snapshots you can take. Each one of them, you have a little different perspective depending on what point in time you look at it from. So in the end, this was kind of our last window, so we had to make a decision and do what we felt was best for the football team."
Just as he did on a conference call on Tuesday, Belichick praised Garoppolo and said he has a very bright future ahead of him in the NFL.
"But this is the business side of football, and I think we all understand it when we get into it that there are certain business things that are going to take place," Belichick said. "That's just the way it is."
Belichick confirmed that the Patriots are "working toward" getting Brian Hoyer signed up to be Tom Brady's backup quarterback, which came as a disappointment to Scott Zolak, who had hoped to maybe get a call to put his Patriots jersey back on. Zolak complained that his age scared off Belichick from making the move.
"Wait a minute," Belichick corrected. "We don't discriminate on age. Uh-uh."
As for the event this week, Belichick said he looks forward to taking questions from and talking with fans, as well as sharing stories on stage with former longitme ESPN host Chris Berman.
"With Chris, we'll get into some good Boston stories, some football stories, some prime time. As we all know, Chris Berman's a pretty colorful guy and has a lot of history in this area and has a lot of history covering various sporting events," Belichick said. "We've got some film clips from both of us from our earlier years as well as from our later years, and so I think it'll be a fun evening with a little bit of X's and O's but probably a little bit more storytelling and reminiscing and talking about some lighter or maybe less obvious moments about some events and some games and some people."