Bill Belichick On OT Coin Flip Fuss: 'Much Ado About Nothing'
BOSTON (CBS) -- Most people watching the overtime coin flip at MetLife Stadium on Sunday afternoon were quite perplexed as to what was happening, thanks to some miscommunication between Patriots captain Matthew Slater and referee Clete Blakeman. But shortly after the game, just about everything was cleared up: the Patriots intended to kick to the Jets, and the Patriots ended up kicking to the Jets.
From there, the Jets drove 80 yards in less than three minutes to win the game, but the discussion about the overtime coin flip didn't end there.
On Monday, on a conference call with New England reporters, Bill Belichick continued to face several questions about the coin toss before deciding he had enough.
"Yeah, absolutely, for that exact reason, so there wouldn't be any confusion about what was going on," Belichick said when asked if he had told Blakeman ahead of time that he intended to choose to kick. "That's why when I was asked after the game, 'Was there any confusion on the play?' I don't think there was any confusion. Then Clete came over to me after the toss and said, 'You got what you wanted here right?' and I said, 'Yeah, exactly'. It seems like much ado about nothing for me. I don't really understand what the issue is. Like what are we talking about here? Like what should have happened that didn't happen or whatever? I don't know."
Earlier in the call, Belichick said the decision to kick came down to a desire to have better field position in overtime.
"I mean look, the bottom line is field position," Belichick said. "With good field position, you don't have to take it as far. If you get a stop, you need a field goal. It was really more of a field position consideration, similar to other overtime games that we've been in, regardless of which way the wind was going. Look at the Denver game from a couple years ago, or the Denver game from this year, where we had the ball, got stopped, gave it to them with good field position and they ended up scoring a touchdown. But they didn't have very far to go to get into field goal range."
The major point of confusion seemed to be Slater's belief that he could choose which direction the Patriots would be kicking, whereas the winner of the toss can only decide to kick or receive or to defend a particular end of the field. But Belichick said Monday that though he did have a preferred end of the field to defend, that desire was not particularly strong.
"Yeah, sure. The discussion was that we wanted to kick off number one, but number two, if we didn't win the toss, then we had the preferred direction. Honestly it didn't make any difference," he said. "There was almost no wind in the game, so that wasn't a big consideration. What I didn't want to do was [choose to] defend a goal and then have them choose to kick off, so we chose to kick off. Again, I don't know exactly what happened out there at midfield but we obviously didn't have the choice of goals -- [the Jets] did -- but we talked about that on the sideline because that could have been our choice had the coin toss gone differently. So yeah, we did talk about that but in the end the direction of the goal, I don't think there was really any wind advantage. If there was, it was very minimal and not really worth taking a goal over."
And so ends The Great Coin Toss Debate of 2015.
