Belichick, Patriots Ready For Trip To London
BOSTON (CBS) - The Patriots have a long trip to London ahead of them, and a bit of a loopy week in preparation for it.
"This is kind of like a Wednesday for us," Patriots head coach Bill Belichick said Tuesday morning. "We had a quick turnaround here after the Jets game and we're onto St. Louis."
The Patriots will leave for London on Thursday night, causing them to shift their weekly planning a bit.
"We're going to try to add a little bit extra time on the back-end to rest and kind of get adjusted and all that, rather than spend it on game planning and that kind of thing. We're going to try to do that on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, instead of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday," explained Belichick. "[We'll] kind of take Friday as a travel day and obviously we're traveling Thursday night but the whole traveling Friday, getting adjusted, getting settled and all that, we'll see how much we actually get done that day."
Belichick hopes to have his Patriots back to normal come Saturday, with a match-up with the St. Louis Rams on tap for Sunday night (London time) at Wembley Stadium.
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This is not the Patriots first trip across the pond, as they beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in front of over 84,000 fans back in 2009.
But there has been a lot of turnover since then, with only 14 players remaining from that trip. So there will be a lot of Patriots that have to get used to driving on the other side of the road, tea and crumpets and of course, what "loo" means.
And they'll have to get used to a different kind of crowd that will greet them on Sunday.
"It's a little different environment out there. They do the soccer cheers and the rugby cheers and all that. It's a little less football-oriented and a little more, I don't know, whatever you'd call that," said Belichick.
But other than all of that, not much is changing for the Patriots this week. Their trip to London will be just another away game on their schedule.
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"The time change, the travel – that's certainly different than most normal games. But, again, it's not anything we haven't dealt with before," said Belichick. "We've traveled to the West Coast, we're just going the other direction. Hopefully we'll be able to deal with it.
Tune in to the Patriots-Rams game Sunday afternoon at 1pm on WBZ-TV and 98.5 The Sports Hub. Pregame coverage beings at 11am on the Hub with Patriots Preview, with three hours of post game coverage following the game. WBZ-TV kicks off their coverage at 11:30am with Patriots GameDay, and full post game coverage with Patriots 5th Quarter.
