Bill Belichick post-game press conference

TAMPA -- Comments from Bill Belichick's post-game press conference (click on "full entry" link for complete transcript)

Opening statement
“Well, I think it was pretty obvious that we have a lot of work to do based on tonight, really in all three phases of the game. I didn’t think we played as well or competitively as we’re capable of playing, certainly. It’s a lot of little things, but those little things add up to big things. Starting with me, we all have to do a better job. We’ll see another good team this week, against Philadelphia, and hopefully we can get a little better performance than that.”

More on the team’s performance:
“I’m sure there were positives out there for everybody and I’m sure there were negatives for everybody. So we’ll look at the tape and evaluate that. We got some experience against a good team, against a fast team, against a playoff team. Like I said, there are a lot of things that we need to do better. Hopefully we can work on those and get them done.”

On his first impressions of John Lynch in a Patriots uniform:
“He was only in there for a few plays but at least he got some exposure in our system and got a few plays. So we’re underway. We have a long way to go. I’m sure we’ll gain a lot more ground this week than we did in one day of practice last week.”

Another loss in the secondary with Brandon Meriweather. It seems every year, for whatever reason, there are injuries at the position...
“Yeah, we’ll see how that goes. I’m not sure exactly what the situation is. Hopefully it’s not a problem.”

Is Matt Gutierrez, who did not play, still in the quarterback mix?
“We wanted to get a good look at Matt [Cassel] and Kevin [O’Connell]. I’m sure he’ll be ready to play.”

If this was a regular-season game, would Tom Brady have played?
“It’s not a regular-season game.”

Was it a last-minute decision with Tom?
“Was it a last-minute thing? I don’t know. We had a lot of players that didn’t make the trip. Guys that were here played, and the ones that didn’t, didn’t. If they weren’t going to play, they weren’t going to make the trip.”

Are you concerned about him at all? How would you characterize the injury?
“I wouldn’t characterize it.”

You often say, when one guy goes down it’s an opportunity for others. Did that give Cassel and O’Connell more of an opportunity than they would have gotten?
“Yeah, all the guys that were down here got an opportunity to play. I think that was good experience for everyone who played in the game. I’m not saying that we all did a great job, but it gave them an opportunity to play and gives us a chance to evaluate them, and gives us a chance to get better and learn from it.”

On the final drive of the second quarter:
“We weren’t really in a two-minute mode, even at that point. We just took our timeouts and we had a lot of substitutions at that point, so rather than try to get into something with a lot of different people we really just kind of took our timeouts. That was a nice kick by Steve [Gostkowski] at the end of the first half.”

Shawn Crable generated a turnover for the second straight game …
“Yeah, we had a few moments on defense, but we gave up a 17-play drive to start the game and missed some tackles on a couple short passes and they turned into long passes, so again I think there were some positives out there but there are a lot of things that need to be worked on. We’ll try to build on the positive things and work on the negative things and see if we can improve our game a little bit.”

Is that tough in a short week?
“That’s the way it is in preseason. We’ll take advantage of the opportunities we have and try to make the most of them.”