New Orleans Saints Forums - blackandgold.com - Bill Belichick loves new technology, but only if it works

Patriots coach Bill Belichick’s sideline VCR clock is still reading 12:00.

The new tablet computers that the league has introduced this year could be beneficial to coaches on the sidelines, but only if they work properly.

That was an issue for Belichick during Thursday’s game at Washington, since a bad network connection kept his from working properly.

“The tablets have the ability to hold all the pictures in one tablet so you can kind of scroll through them. It’s certainly much more concise and I would say the quality of the tablets is good, the clarity of the pictures and all that is good, better than what we had,” Belichick said, via Erik Frenz of Boston.com. “The issues are those are wireless tablets down on the field, and so if the wireless — or Wi-Fi — isn’t connected or isn’t working or something happens, then you’ve got nothing. You’ve got zero. So that happened in our game, and it’s happened in other games from my understanding of talking to other people that have been involved.”

Belichick said he’s not the only one experiencing problems with the new technology.

“In the press box they’re good, on the field, they haven’t — to my knowledge, I don’t have a big sample here but with the people that I’ve talked to — there haven’t been a lot of instances where they’ve functioned for the entirety of the game,” he said. “At some point, they were down and they came back. I think there are some plusses to them, I think there are some things that we need to get used to in terms of using the product. . . .

“It’s really no new information, it’s not like we’re getting a new picture or a new view or a new anything we haven’t seen before. I’d just say the way that it comes on the tablets and it’s all together and easier to access is the plus side of it, and I’d say so far, overall, being able to count on it being all connected and working right is an issue we’re working through.”

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