Wednesday, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick gave a little explanation of advance scouting, which is when teams study and gather information on teams two or more games ahead in the schedule.
While Belichick and his closer assistants are working toward the Week 8 Pittsburgh Steelers game following the bye, his advance scouts will be on to study the New York Giants, who New England faces in Week 9.
“We have people in our organization that work on not this week's opponent but next week's opponent but starting this week so that when we finish with that game, we have a lot of information that's already prepared,” Belichick told the media. “The film is broken down, the reports are written on personnel and tendencies and we have individual reports and films of each individual player, how they play, their strengths, their weaknesses, their tendencies, things like that so that's already there. So we do that on a weekly basis anyway.
“ ... We kind of have that weekly time by certain people in our organization -- they're always a week ahead. And then there are others of us that are focused on the week that we have and really don't get to that next team until we're done with the team we're currently competing against.”
With Week 10 being New York Jets’ week, it wouldn’t be surprising if the Patriots’ advance scouts are putting in some early work to go after the sweep of their division rival.
“Now, will some of those people maybe get a little bit ahead of getting ahead? I'm sure they will,” Belichick said. “But that's kind of how it works. We're on sort of the same routine every week.”
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