Pats settling down in Los Angeles
Team won’t return home until after Thursday’s game against Rams
FOXBORO — The New England Patriots are heading west to Los Angeles to meet the Chargers Sunday and then the Rams in a Thursday night game.
The logistics, though, are a bit skewered in that the Patriots will remain in California, where they will have to weather the spread of the coronavirus.
“When we made the travel arrangements back in the spring, we were dealing with COVID back then, too,” Patriots coach Bill Belichick said after his Tuesday meeting. “It wasn’t like this (COVID-19) was unexpected. It was all talked about then. For the most part, our travel this year has been fine. It hasn’t been an issue.”
With the NFL on a lockdown for Monday and Tuesday of this week in order to better control the potential for COVID-19 cases among teams, the Patriots’ practice plans have been a bit disrupted.
“We’ve been through it before, so a lot of the things that we’re doing here are what we’ve done at some other point during the year in some shape or form,” Belichick said. ”Internally, there’s some other adjustments that we’ve had to make as well, but that’s where we are this year. There’s going to be things we’ve done differently all year, and I’m sure there will be more somewhere along the way.
“So, whatever they are, they are. We’ll work it out,” he added. “The virtual meetings and some little things we have to work through logistically internally with the players, travel — there’s a number of different things. Some affect you today, some affect you when you travel, some affect you on game day, some will affect a number of people in the facility, et cetera.
“So, whatever they are, they are. We’ll take them as they come.”
The value of having practice players like Akeem Spence and Donte Moncrief ready to contribute on Sunday in a game, as experienced in the Patriots’ 20-17 win over Arizona, is important. To have healthy bodies free of COVID-19 is just as important.
Wide receiver Julian Edelman, seemingly, was to be cleared for duty, only to be placed on the COVID-19 restricted list.
“We are traveling out there before the Chargers game, so it won’t be a whole lot different than other road trips,” Belichick said. “What happens after that, I mean, that’s a whole other conversation. Right now, honestly, we are focused on the Chargers and getting ready to prepare and play them.”
The main difference is that after playing the Chargers Sunday, the Patriots will remain on the West Coast, having three days to prepare for the Rams.
New England has a 22-14-2 edge in the series, having won four straight over the Chargers. The two teams original eight American Football League members last played in January, 2019 in Foxboro during the AFC playoffs.
“There’s not a lot of difference between this trip and the Seattle trip just in terms of time, scheduling and so forth, other than that was a night game,” Belichick said.
Standing 5-6 this season, the Patriots are looking to reach .500 and keep their ever-shrinking playoff hopes alive. The Chargers (3-8) and rookie QB Justin Hebert are searching for consistency and respectability.
“The bulk of our travel plans are done when the schedule comes out,” Belichick said of the itinerary. “You have to secure transportation, particularly hotels and all that. You can’t wait until the week before the game to set that up.
“So, those things are done well in advance and then sometimes details get ironed out based on the size of the travel party or maybe there’s a time schedule change and so forth — work that out with the flight and the hotel.
“I would say, for the most part over the years and even including this year, I’d say 95 percent of all that is done well in advance of the trip,” he added. “With an occasional exception here or there, there’s five percent that’s left to do during the actual week of the travel relative to some logistical change that might occur or something that pops up.”
For the Patriots is COVID-19 protocol preparing at Gillette Stadium, then spending almost a week in California, in a hotel and in a practice facility yet to be named.
“That’s one of the things we’ll talk about for our practice planning for tomorrow and through the week is how to divide up the players,” Belichick said of the players on the 53-man roster and the practice squad. “Sometimes you might have one player that could be one of two players, and then you have to pick out which one you want him to be and that type of thing. So, each week is a little bit of a different conversion.
“At the same time, we want to try to give those players an opportunity to work on things that will help them in their position, either improve or prepare for the game.
“Like, if they are backup players that would have a role in our game, not practice squad players, then we don’t want to necessarily ask them to do something that is totally different that wouldn’t help them work on their skills.
“It’s really a combination of trying to take all those into consideration, plus the overall health and physical condition of your team and individual players, guys that you might want to practice a little less or there might be players you want to practice a little more.
“It’s really a weekly discussion that at times can become a daily discussion on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday based on what you are working on as you go from, call it, early downs to third downs to the red area.
“It’s very much of a week-to-week and even sometimes a day-to-day decision. It’s always something we want to try to get ahead of, and like I said, try to present the best look at what our opponents do as we can so that the plays in practice have the most similarity to what we’ll be facing.”