FOXBORO -- Bill Belichick looked across at the Seahawks sideline, and he had a feeling.
Seattle was threatening deep in Patriots territory in the final moments of Super Bowl XLIX, and Belichick was analyzing his opponent, trying to figure out whether or not he should call a timeout to get his defensive plan set.
He went through his thought process at the time in the upcoming NFL Network special "Do Your Job."
"I thought about the timeout, and when I looked over there . . . I don't know," Belichick said. "Something just didn't look right."
Patriots defensive coordinator Matt Patricia asked Belichick, "What do you want to do? Do you want the timeout?"
In one of the preview clips for "Do Your Job," Patricia said, "That was a very lonely moment for me because he wouldn't talk to me. He wouldn't even look at me. He was just kind of staring across the field."
Eventually Belichick made his call.
New England Patriots
"No," he said to the time out. "Just play goal line."
Seconds later Malcolm Butler intercepted Russell Wilson, and the Patriots won their fourth Lombardi Trophy under Belichick.
With "Do Your Job" airing on Wednesday night at 8 p.m., and with Monday's press conference serving as our last availability period with Belichick before Thursday night's season-opener, I asked Belichick about coaching on "feel," as he seemed to do when he opted not to call a timeout in that crucial situation.
How often, I asked, does it happen that a decision is made when there may be no other explanation for a call other than it felt right?
"That's hard to quantify, really, but it's just something that you feel," he said. "I've called plays for a significant part of my career, and there's times that you just get a feeling that goes against the tendency or there's something that you can just kind of instinctively feel like is gonna happen, and then you do something to try to take advantage of it.
"The right time to call a double-pass or the right time to run a blitz. Or you just anticipate what they're gonna do. You just anticipate what the other play-caller is going to do and you happen to guess right. I mean we all guess wrong plenty of times, too, I'm not saying that. But, yeah, there's definitely some of that, where you just kind of get a feel for how the game's going or a particular situation as it unfolds, and you make that call just based on what you feel at that time.
"Not, 'What was the tendency?' Not, 'What do they do in the situation in a bunch of other games?' You just feel like at this point in time, this is where they're going to put their chips. You think they're gonna blitz you and you call a play that's a good blitz-beater play, or you think they're going to, whatever, fake it or pull out of it. You have to be able to handle whatever they do, but there's definitely an element to that. Same way in the kicking-game too."
During his reply, Belichick took the opportunity to credit the instincts of his two primary play-callers: Patricia and offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels.
"I think Josh and Matt they do a great job of that," Belichick said. "They call the majority of the plays, and they do a great job of anticipating what could happen in certain situations. You have to be ready for two, three, four things, whatever it happens to be. But then, every once in a while, you get that feeling that, 'This is the time. This is when we wanna do it.'
"And they're right. They're right quite a bit."