Patriots' players have the day off. Rust never sleeps.

New England Patriots head coach Bill Bellichick held a conference call with the media today. Here is an excerpt, as reported today by The Boston Globe:

“Pittsburgh is a hard team to prepare for. What I don’t think you want to do is give your team a game plan and then as you do more work on the team, 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 make sure that with the extra time we’ve had this morning that we could 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.”

Translation:

“We are currently analyzing all the conversations we were able to obtain from our hidden microphones at Steelers headquarters and the wiretapped phones of Steelers coaches and players. We’ve also been busy going over the intercepted e-mails our IT guys forwarded to us, as well as their game plans that our in-house hackers have been able to pick up from the Steelers’ computer systems.”

“We’re confident we know what the Steelers plan to do. We have a few surprises planned for them. I'll just say this: Daniel Sepulveda, their punter, better get his kicks off a hell of a lot quicker than he’s been doing. Methinks a blocked punt early in the game would rattle his cage, set the tone and really get our fans involved."

"I’d like that. I really would.”