Patriots cancel Saturday walkthrough, will just take team picture
By Hayden Kane
The New England Patriots cancelled their Saturday walkthrough in advance of the biggest day of the NFL season, their Super Bowl showdown with the Seattle Seahawks.
The Patriots won’t have a walkthrough. The day before the Super Bowl, and head coach Bill Belichick says that his team is “as ready as they will ever be.” Whether that sentiment reflects immense confidence or concedes a certain measure of hopelessness, it is confusing when it comes from Belichick.
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According to CSN New England, Belichick cancelled the walkthrough and hence made Friday the team’s final day of practice before the Super Bowl. But that doesn’t mean the team had the day off on Saturday. They need to take a team picture, a point emphasized more than once by Belichick.
“We’re just going to meet, take a team picture,” Belichick said, via CSNNE.com. “This is it. Practice-wise, we’re done. We’re as ready as we’re going to be.”
So there’s nothing else on Saturday, Bill? Nothing at all?
“We’ll just meet in the morning, take the team picture and that’s it.”
There could be a number of explanations for this. It could be that Belichick already saw his team go through a practice that was described as “soggy” on Friday and saw no reason to push things any further to risk injury, even with something as seemingly harmless as a walkthrough. But why limit ourselves to that explanation?
Maybe Bill Belichick, regarded as a mastermind by more than a few people, genuinely believes that his team is ready to own the Seahawks. Maybe Belichick, also one who is not short on confidence, is using a media report to attempt to get in Seattle’s head.
There’s also the possibility that team pictures are just really important to Belichick. Maybe he places a quality team picture near the top of his list of priorities, just behind adapting his game plan for individual opponents and slightly ahead of science projects, about deflated footballs or otherwise.
One could also imagine that it just takes an exceptionally long time for the Patriots to successfully sit for a team photograph. Where do you put Tom Brady so that his handsomeness does not overwhelm the rest of the picture? Do they have trouble getting Rob Gronkowski to pay attention long enough to take the picture? That could just be the beginning of the list of questions.
This decision might just be about the walkthrough, but we can’t rule out the possibility that it’s actually about the team picture.