The highlights of Bill Belichick's daily press briefing on Thursday:

How has Monty Beisel looked over the last few games?
I think Monty has done a good job. I think he's done a good job. I think a lot of our players, especially defensively, we are playing better team defense over the last, I don't know, six, eight weeks, whatever it's been. I would definitely include him in that group, along with everybody else. Everybody is doing a little bit better job. We are able to be more aggressive. I think we're more confident in what we're doing and what our teammates are doing. He's part of that. I think he's done a good job.

Do we tend to overstate the inside linebacker's role in stopping the run? You always talk about it being a team thing, but we say those two guys have to stop the run. That's not exactly how it's drawn up I think.
I would agree with that. If there's a lot of things that get overstated, that would be one of them. It's team defense. One guy can't do it. One guy can't stop it. It would take more than one guy to break it down.

At this point is your defense reacting as good as they have all season?
I would say over maybe the last third of the season we've played our best overall team defense of the year. Now there have been plays in there that haven't been all that hot. But I would say the last third of the season, our team defense has been better than it was in the first two thirds. Let's put it that way. So yes.

Tedy Bruschi was named comeback player of the year with Steve Smith. Are you still amazed or are you amazed at what he's been able to do this year?
Well, it's been such a gradual, steady thing. It wasn't like the room was dark and all of a sudden the light switch was flipped on. His progress was very gradual and consistent from going back to last February and month by month. I can just think of where he was in March, April, May, June, July, August, September, getting out on the field in October and November. It's been slow and it's been steady and it's been consistent. So if you look back now and say, 'Well, was I surprised given where he was in February?' Yeah, probably. That'd be fair. But from February to March, from March to April, from April to May, there was such a steady stream of progress that kind of with each week and with each month, you could see him getting better and doing things he couldn't do before and looking more like Tedy, both physically and his demeanor. On a day-to-day basis, it was much less dramatic than what it would be if you just jumped from February to December or January.

Do you even think about it anymore?
I haven't thought about it in a while.

Did you think his career was over when it happened?
I never said that. It wouldn't be for me to say anyway.

What are some of the things that he's doing better than he was in October?
Everything. I think everything. All of the plays that he has to play, I think it takes a little while, as I said, to get that reaction, that timing, that quickness back. It's not a question as much as physical conditioning, although that is a little bit of an issue because Tedy is a well conditioned athlete, but just the timing and the defensive reaction and recognition of playing football, like I said, you can do sit-ups and run around the track all day, but that doesn't really get you ready to play football with the other 21 guys out there on the field. I think he has improved in every aspect of his game during the time that he's been on the field the last, whatever it has been, two-and-a-half, three months.

The running game against Jacksonville, you talked yesterday about the tackles. How do you get past them? You send blockers beyond them to get to the linebackers as well, but are they that disruptive that it's hard to get to that second level blocking wise?
They're hard to block, so the longer you stay with them, the slower you are getting to the linebackers, then the more the linebackers are going to be free and the more tackles they are going to make. The quicker you get off the down linemen and get up to the linebackers, then the longer you have to hold those blocks on [John] Henderson and [Marcus] Stroud and [Paul] Spicer and [Reggie] Hayward, [Rob] Meier. All of them. That's tough. It's tough to block linebackers too. I'm not saying they're easy to block. If you just have a man for everybody, it's just Stroud and Henderson. They're a load. Very good.

Your style of running the type of plays you run, how does that fit against the style of defense that they play?
I mean, they're hard to block. Somebody has to block them, but I'm just saying they're hard to block. They both use their hands well. They're strong. They have good lower body strength. It's hard to move them off the line of scrimmage. It's hard to cut them. They're athletic. They play on their feet well. They have good range. They can cover some ground sideline to sideline. A lot of times you try to double team guys like that. You say, 'Well, we'll double-team them,' but then the guy goes to double team them and those guys, this isn't the first time they've ever been doubled teamed. They're big enough and strong enough to just grab both guys. Now the guy that the double team is supposed to come off to, that blocker can never get off to them and so that guy is free. Look, they have a good scheme. They have good players. Not just those two guys, but certainly they're a big focus of it. And they're right in the middle. You have to deal with them every play. It's not like you have a corner where you can throw to the other side or you have an outside linebacker [where] you can run away from him. It's two tackles. There is no play where you can run that you don't have to block them.

How do you assess your own running backs ability to hit holes this year? Has it been where you'd like it to be?
Well, we're not going to get into a big breakdown analysis of all of the players right now. We're getting ready for Jacksonville and that's where our focus is. We have confidence in all of our backs, whoever is in there. We have confidence in them running the ball, catching it, carrying out their assignments, blitz pickup and all of that. So, if they're out there, then we have confidence in them doing the job.

The general thought on the passing game is the guy that is open gets the ball automatically. Well, not automatically.
Well, that's the guy you want to be throwing to. You certainly don't want to be throwing to the guy that is covered.

How much of that is philosophy and how much of it is [Tom] Brady's ability to find whoever is open? He's not looking at one guy all of the time. It can be five different plays, five different players, the same plays can go to three or four different receivers.
I think that is common in a lot of passing games. There are different ways, different philosophies to throw the ball and a lot of times you have more than one concept in your pass offense. It's not always the same read or the same progression on every play. But, I think most teams that drop back, if you want to use the whole field, then you read the coverage and see where they have the most people and throw it where they have the least people. You want to think, where they have the least amount of coverage, that you can get open in a one-on-one situation, or if it's zone where there are fewer people in the zone, that you can create those spaces. Now sometimes the coverage is pretty balanced, where you basically have the same thing on this side as you have on that side, then in that case, the quarterback has the option of going to where he feels like the best matchup is. Against a certain receiver he wants to go to on a route or against a certain defensive player he wants to attack on that route. Then it's kind of a dealer's choice for the quarterback. Where there is a certain progression that the coverage rolls one way to take a certain part of the pattern away, then the percentages of throwing into that generally aren't very good. It depends on the pattern. There might be a couple of things that might work, but for the most part, you're better off throwing where there are fewer people and more space for the offense and count on those guys to get open.

A lot of that comes just after the snap when the safety decides where he is going?
Well, the safety and the linebackers. They have seven guys in coverage for the most part, if there's not a blitz. There are seven guys in coverage. There are usually four guys on the strong side and three on the weak side. And that goes in different combinations. But, sometimes you can take those seven guys and move them around differently. You can go five and two. You can go four and three. You can kind of go three and three and keep one guy in the middle, whether it's a free safety or a middle linebacker or whoever it is. You can distribute those guys different ways. Play man coverage. Play zone coverage. Play some combination of it. I'm not talking about blitzing right now. I'm just saying like regular coverages. So then based on the pattern that you have called, then you want to go where you basically have the advantageous numbers. If you have three guys out on this side and one out on that side, there are four over here and three over there, then you want to throw three against four rather than one against three. Or if you are two by two, and they're four and three, then you're better off throwing two against three than two against four. It just depends on how the pattern is distributed and what coverage they play. That's in simplified terms. That's how the reading progression goes.

Do you generally have a 'What is a balanced passing attack' philosophy?
It depends on what they're doing. If a team is playing a balanced coverage, if they basically want to come out and play a balanced coverage, then if you run balanced routes, then you're basically running right into the coverage. If you overload the routes and put more people over here and fewer over there and they want to balance it up and they have more people covering this guy and relatively fewer people covering the overloaded patterns, once you get into the overloaded patterns or they swing the coverage over there and overload it with you, then you have more space over here back on the weak side of the pattern. It comes down to whether or not you can win back there, but you certainly have a lot more space and a lot more things you can work with. Anytime a guy is defending a receiver one-on-one, he could cover every route, but he can't really technique every route. So if you're inside, then you should be able to run outside routes. If he's outside, you should be able to run inside routes. If he's off, then theoretically you should be able to throw it in front of him. If he up pressed, then theoretically you should have a chance to get the ball down the field on him. Just because it's one-on-one back there, if he's playing outside technique, and you run an out-route, that's not that great of a pattern either. But, if you can get to the singled side and the corner is playing outside and you're running an inside route, if you can't hit that then I don't know what you're going to be able to hit.

You never go into a game saying 'We want to throw the ball to this guy at least 10 times today' do you?
Well, you can say that, but you can't really control that. 'Okay, we want to try to get the ball to so and so,' or, 'We want to try to throw it on so and so,' but depending on that particular play, if that is where the guy is double covered or the guy you want to throw at is getting help and now you're trying to stuff the ball into a tight spot, that's just low percentage passing. I mean, you can do it, you'll probably hit a couple here and there. But in the end, it's low percentage football. There are a lot better options on the field than doing that, in my opinion. You tell quarterback, 'Okay, let's throw the ball to this guy,' and he has two guys around him. Then what are you going to do? You throw it in there and get it picked off, now what do you tell the quarterback? I just think it's low percentage football. Now, you're talking about a screen pass, that's a different story. That's really like a running play. You know who is going to get the ball on a screen pass. Usually there's only one receiver involved. You run a screen pass to this guy, if he's open, you have a play. If he's covered, you're pretty much throwing it away. You know what I mean? It's not like you have, 'Well let's read the coverage.' You have a screen. You know who's going to get the ball on a screen. That's more of like a running play, when you hand the guy the ball. You know basically where it's going to end up, well you basically know where a screen pass is going to end up and that's part of the passing game. Other than that, I think that's the advantage of the passing game, is to keep your options open and go where there are fewer people rather than where there are more.

Do you look at game planning at all as problem solving on a week-to-week basis? Do you assess their weaknesses and strengths and yours and try to figure it out?
That's what game planning is. That's exactly what it is.

Do you like that part of it?
It's part of coaching. I like all of coaching. It's understanding what they're doing, trying to prepare your team for what they do. Try to come up with what you feel like gives the players an opportunity to be successful, teaching them that, going through it either on the practice field or in the game. It doesn't always work the way you want it to, so you either change something that you're doing, or try to coach it better so that you can still do it, but help the players figure out the way to solve the problem that they're having with the play. Then you get into the game situations and it's more of the same process, just accelerated into a smaller timeframe and more critical situations. But I enjoy all of that.

It seems like that could be a fun part of the job, trying to figure out the puzzle every week.
Well, it's very challenging because you have all of the other good teams in the league, good coaches, good players and everybody has a lot of things to work with and they're trying to cause you more problems than you're trying to cause them. You just have to try to figure out what the best thing to do is, what gives you the best chance given all of the things that you're trying to take into consideration. I think it's hard in this league to just do the same thing every time. Pretty much everybody can figure out a way to handle that, no matter what it is. You have to have enough variety to not be so predictable, unless you can just go out there and execute it flawlessly time after time, which there may be some teams that can do that in certain aspects of their game, but certainly not in all three phases on a consistent basis. I think that would be pretty rare. But yeah, that's what a big part of coaching is. There are a lot of other things that go with it too. You talk about game planning, but also that leads into preparation and practice. You only have so many plays out there in practice. Which ones are you going to run? What are you going to run them against? What do you think the other team is going to do when you run those plays? If you end up practicing them against the wrong thing, then that's really a waste of time. Then you end up never really practicing it against what you're going to see out there on Sunday. That's all part of it too.

You've called this the season of truth. Do you consider this one of your most challenging years?
I think every year is a challenge. I think every single year you face great teams, great players, great coaches. There are always challenges within every season, at every point in the season. I'd look at this like just about every other year. There's going to be challenges, things you have to work with, and things that you're going to have to work through. Right now Jacksonville is a huge challenge. They have the fourth best record in the league. They're a very strong, physical team that hasn't been in the playoffs in a couple of years. They're hungry. You can tell they're excited about the whole process. So are we. It's going to be a big challenge for us Saturday night there. That's exciting. It's great to be playing this time a year. That's what you work all offseason and training camp, meetings, practices. You play 16 regular season games just to have this opportunity. So we have it. It's exciting. It's challenging. They're a good football team. That's a huge challenge for us. That's the biggest challenge.

Did you change the way you coach this year at all with everything that has gone on?
I think you are always changing a little bit. You learn something every year. [You] learn something every week. There are always things that you can learn and maybe apply differently. I think our basic system is our basic system. I don't think it has dramatically changed, but I think it has been modified and will always be kind of a work in progress based on the new challenges that we face on a week-to-week and also year-to-year basis, because they're always going to be changes. That's part of the game. Changes in personnel. Changes in the opponents that we play, and subtle, sometimes not so subtle, changes and trends through the league of what we see and what we have to deal with.