Cole: Why are there so many bad teams around the league this year?

Belichick: Here’s the only thing I’ll say: I think to have a really good team in this league, you have to make a lot, a lot of good decisions. You have to have a lot of good people, players, coaches, whatever. You need a lot of those. Conversely, to not be competitive, you would have to have a lot of bad decisions. One bad decision is not going to do it, one bad player is not going to do it, one bad coach is not going to do it. You’re going to have to collectively, over a cumulative period of time, make a long series of bad decisions and accumulate a lot of players who are substandard for their position. There have to be a multitude of things that go wrong.

Cole: Because you can keep yourself average for a long time?

Belichick: That’s the system. If you don’t have good players, you have money to spend on players. If you have a bunch of good players, you eventually run out of money and you can’t keep them all and somebody else gets them. That’s the system, it keeps everybody average. We’ve seen teams be really good just on coaching. We’ve seen teams be competitive with just a few good players.