Bill Belichick: "it's kind of sad, really, to see some stories written that obviously have an agenda to them"

Bill Belichick did a morning conference call and finally fired off publicly about much of what has gone on in the last week. When he gave his answers last night about issues with the headsets, he was probably unaware of Mike Tomlin’s tone. Add in the headset non-sense with the reports from ESPN’s OTL and SI that dropped earlier this week, and Belichick was ready to talk.

His remarks opened with detailed discussion of headset and technological issues and how they frequently come up in games and you have to be prepared. Then, he went further:

"“I’ll just say, kind of tying this in with a couple of things from last week or earlier in the week, I just think overall, it’s kind of sad, really, to see some stories written that obviously have an agenda to them with misinformation and anonymous type comments. Writing about warm drinks and trash cans and stuff like that, it’s just a sad commentary and it’s gone to a pretty low level. It’s sunk pretty deep.”"

Belichick is referring to the piece from SI on Tuesday that basically characterized “DeflateGate” as a makeup for “SpyGate,” where other owners wanted to go after the Patriots for a host of perceived issues. We discussed it with Mike Florio in our weekly preview.

It would be pretty unfathomable that the Patriots would have intentionally done something to the headsets that the NFL controls in the season opener. But here we are, and as the ESPN piece intimated, there’s plenty of paranoia around the league about the Patriots.