On to Philadelphia: Patriots begin analyzing 2,500 Eagles plays

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Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots’ coaching staff actually took a day to celebrate the team’s AFC Championship win over the Jacksonville Jaguars on Sunday.

But as of yesterday morning, it’s back to work.

Belichick and company are officially “on to Philadelphia” as they have begun evaluating about 2,500 Eagles’ plays. With the last time the two teams faced off having been more than two years ago (Dec. 6, 2015), Belichick says they have “a lot of ground” to cover and that they’re “at it hard trying to play catch up.”

“For all those games that we look at – let’s call it 18 games, just to pick a number – that’s probably 2,500 plays in all three phases of the game and there’s going to be 160 [in the Super Bowl],” Belichick said. “So they can’t do everything that we’ve ever seen them do any more than we could run everything that we have experience running, so we have to whittle down our side of it.”

“We have to be prepared for a lot of things,” he continued. “But at the same time, we can’t be overly distracted by things that either have a low percentage of coming up or probably wouldn’t be the type of thing they would do against us. We try to eliminate some of those and make sure we work on the things that we feel are most problematic or may be most likely to occur.”

Preparations have just begun, and the New England Patriots are en route to another Super Bowl appearance. #NotDone

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