Patriots coach Bill Belichick didn’t wait to be asked any of the obvious questions that were waiting for him on a Tuesday morning conference call.
Belichick opened with a long statement about the decision to trade quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo to the 49ers. Belichick said he has a “tremendous amount of respect” for Garoppolo and that the 49ers are getting a “good quarterback” who the Patriots would have liked to keep on the roster.
Belichick said he couldn’t find any feasible way to make that happen, however, and wanted to make a trade before Tuesday afternoon’s deadline because it was their last chance to do so.
“We probably had in my mind, in my opinion, the best quarterback situation in the league for the last 2.5 years,” Belichick said. “It is just not sustainable given the way that things are set up. Definitely not something we wanted to walk away from and I felt we rode it out as long as we could. We’ve, over a period of time, explored every option possible to sustain it but, at this point, it felt like we had to make a decision. It’s a very complex situation on multiple levels. This is really the last window that we had and we did what we felt was best for the team.”
Belichick said that there were “fair questions” to ask about the way the trade came together and the conversations they had about dealing Garoppolo, but that he wouldn’t be talking about the process. He also said he wouldn’t discuss any other potential roster moves as the team now has one quarterback on the roster and will presumably be bringing someone in to back up Tom Brady.