Information Gathering Phase

Last week, the New England Patriots had a shortened work week. They played on Monday night the previous week instead of the normal Sunday afternoon.

After losing a full day of preparation to the Monday night game and Tuesday as a rest day, the logical plan be to start practicing as soon as possible. Instead, coach Bill Belichick, gave his players an extra day off so the coaches could spend more time gathering information and planning.

The bigger part of the problem isn’t practice for the players, it's for the coaches to be ready for the players when they come in here.

...I don’t think you want to give your team a game-plan and then, as you do more work on the [opponent], find out 'this isn't quite what we want here' and you have to change it.

We thought it would be better to take a little time ourselves from a coaching standpoint, a staff standpoint, to ... get things as close to exactly the way we want them, so when we do give them to the players, we don't have to go back and change them."

—Bill Belichick, Wednesday 12/5/2007

So the Patriots didn't practice on Wednesday, but the coaches spent the day gathering information and planning. Four days later, the Patriots spent Sunday afternoon scoring at will against the Pittsburgh Steelers.