Q & A Time With Bill Belichick

Shank took a trip to Gillette Stadium to get a bunch of grunts and half-answers from the affable Patriots head coach:

Bill Belichick knows how to work the clock, even in a preseason press conference

FOXBOROUGH — MLB has the highly effective “pitch clock.” Colleague Bob Ryan suggests a universal “anthem clock” to curtail unnecessarily lengthy renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before ballgames.

Monday at Gillette … for the 24th consecutive season, we again experienced Bill Belichick’s time-tested “interview clock.’’

We arrived at the coach’s coveted media availability armed with a list of questions. With the Patriots scheduled to fly to Wisconsin Tuesday, then on to Nashville for back-to-back road preseason games, Monday represented the local press corps’s last chance to talk to Bill at Gillette for almost two weeks.

Driving down Route 1, I’d heard sports-radio patter about undrafted rookie Malik Cunningham (in camp as a wide receiver) becoming one of the greatest sports stories of all time by unseating Mac Jones as the Patriots’ starting quarterback. Cunningham quarterbacked New England’s lone touchdown drive in the exhibition opener against Houston and is all the rage of a largely dull camp.