Long night to savor the victory
FOXBOROUGH -- The Patriots had boarded their plane at Newark Airport Sunday night when an announcement came that Logan Airport was closed because of the snowstorm. So the team made a seven-hour, four-bus caravan trip through icy, windy, and snowy conditions.
It wasn't a first for Bill Belichick.
"It was funny, Romeo [Crennel] and I were talking about that on the way back," said the Patriots coach. "When we played the Patriots here at the end of the '90 season, it was my last year with the Giants. We played the final game here in old Foxboro [Stadium] of course. There were about 10,000 people at the game. It was cold. It was icy. It was a terrible day and I think the Patriots were like 1-15 or something like that and we had a pretty good team. We were headed into the playoffs but barely won [13-10]. It was a low-scoring game. It was a terrible game.
"We, after the game, got on the bus thinking we were headed for the airport and found out that the airports were closed. There was ice. Planes couldn't take off. Planes couldn't land. So we were going to bus it back. So we got on the buses and we bused it back, 10 miles an hour, typical, like it was last night.
"But one of the funny things of the trip was that the owner, Wellington [Mara], was there on the bus and so we were driving along and pull into the rest stop in Westchester County, the owner gets off, gets picked up [by a car], the bus goes back to Giants Stadium. That was pretty funny."
According to Belichick, the buses got back to Gillette Stadium at 4 a.m. He, of course, stayed there.
"You're here, you might as well just come in and push through it," he said. "I watched the tape [of the Jets game], caught a little nap, and just tried to start getting ready for San Francisco."
No word on Seymour
Richard Seymour appeared to injure his left knee in the third quarter when center Kevin Mawae landed on him, but Belichick could not clarify his condition yesterday. "I really don't know that," he said. "It's too close after the game. We'll take a look and see where we are [tomorrow] when we go out to practice, where he is and where everybody else is." There were security people in the area of Seymour's locker at the Meadowlands, but it wasn't clear whether they were there to keep reporters away from him or just to give him room in the tight quarters. Belichick said he knew nothing of it. "I was in another part of the locker room," he said . . . Belichick said he wasn't aware that Corey Dillon (with 1,519 yards) had broken Curtis Martin's franchise rushing record until yesterday morning. "I will say that that's a tremendous accomplishment," Belichick said. "We all know what kind of back Curtis is, and that's a lot of yards, that's a lot of production in one year. That goes to a lot of positives, but certainly Corey himself deserves a lot of credit for his durability and his production, along with the guys who are blocking for him and all that." . . . Belichick called the win over the Jets "our best game of the year, and I thought it needed to be our best game of the year." Beating a good team like the Jets, coupled with the fact that he didn't think the team had played up to its potential the previous two weeks, were contributing reasons for that opinion. "It was frustrating," he said. "I don't think it was from a lack of effort or a lack of preparation, because I've seen that pretty consistently all year. It just didn't happen on game day. But that's when it needs to happen. Nobody cares whether they go out there and catch a pass on Wednesday. They only care whether we catch it on Sunday."
