Some playoff teams rest starters in meaningless late-season games. Some don’t.
Former Patriots coach Bill Belichick shared his views on the dilemma during the latest episode of the Lets’ Go! podcast.
“I mean, you can only have seven inactive guys,” Belichick said. “Who are they? And it’s tough to go to your team and say, ‘Well, we’re not gonna play you guys over here, but the rest of you get out there. We don’t really care about you. If you get hurt, that doesn’t matter, but these six or seven guys we’re going to protect.’
“You can’t say that to the team. That doesn’t resonate well at all, nor should it. So I always had a hard time with that one. Now, if a guy was fighting an injury and everybody understood that the guy was fighting an injury, OK, that’s one thing. But to just say, ‘Well, you guys are important, but you other guys aren’t, we don’t care what happens to you. Get out there and play.’ That’s not a message I could ever send to the team. Even though there were people in the organization that wanted me to send that, I just couldn’t do it.”
Other coaches have done it, and will do it. But with only 53 players on the roster and 47 active players, removing a bunch of them from consideration for playing makes it harder to suit up sufficient players to get through a game.
There’s still risk in playing key players in a meaningless game. For some coaches, there’s no alternative to honoring the depth chart at all times.
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