Coaches spend their whole offseasons making sure their teams are prepared for the upcoming season.

This includes countless hours devising plays, studying film and meeting with their staffs, all in the hopes of creating a successful season.

As the NFL preseason enters its last week, Kevin Dillon, New England Patriots writer for masslive.com asked five-time Super Bowl champion coach Bill Belichick a few questions about he prepares for the end of preseason and gears up for their first game, Sept. 7 against the Kansas City Chiefs.

Q: As you pivot to the regular season, is it challenging to keep your eye on the fundamentals and the things you focus on early in camp to make sure those are squared away without losing sight of other goals?

Belichick: Yeah, we never want to lose sight of fundamentals, but it's easy to do because you get caught up in schemes and a bunch of other things. But we're still in building block stages of fundamentals for each position, or double-team blocks, combination blocks, things like that, where it's not just you, but you and a teammate working, or maybe you and two other guys working on three-for-three or that type of thing, being able to see it the same, using the complementary techniques and so forth. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're definitely not there yet. Hopefully, we're gaining ground on it but we're not there yet. I'd say as you get into some of the more higher degree of difficulty things like picking up three-man gains on pass protection, things like that, which we haven't seen a lot of in training camp or preseason games but we know they're coming, your tight end is in protection they can be tight end-tackle-guard, things like that. The degree of difficulty on some of those will pick up, yeah.

Q: Are there things that you've learned over the years that you think have helped with how you approach that portion of the season, the transition from preseason to regular season, in terms of knowing which fundamentals to peel away from earlier on or other ones to put more attention toward?

Belichick: Well, I mean, ideally it's probably like anything else. What you do, you want to get done properly and then lay the foundation and move on to something else. If you move too quickly to the next step, then your foundation crumbles, then you don't really have anything. That's really the judgment, is how long do we stay on the first phase? When are we ready to go to the second phase? And that may vary from player to player. It may vary from group to group. It may vary from the left side to the right side of your line. There are a lot of variables there but you have to try and figure that out and, if you move too quickly then your fundamentals are just never really in place. If you stay too long, then you can get beat by some schemes because you just haven't worked on them, so there is a balance there. Like I said, it's not the same for everybody. You move at the lace you can move at. Where the [defensive backs] are might be different than where the linebackers are, might be different than where the offensive line is. You've still got to make - that's where position coaches and coordination make such important decisions, just not little things, but little things, those types of things. When do we go to the next thing? How much work do we need before we can move ahead? When are we ready to go to the next stage? That's what a good position coach, and good coordinator does. They make a lot of little decisions like that, like "Look, we're not going to be able to do this. We've tried it. It's not going well. I just think we need to try something else or do something else an alternative way to handle this problem." And those are the kinds of things that really make great assistant coaches because there are a thousand things like that and each one of them is a little bit different and the players are different and so forth. That teaching and those decisions and the presentation and kind of keeping that moving forward, not staying in the same place but moving forward, be moving forward at the right pace, not just at the pace that we did it last year or the pace we did it in "13. It's doing what's right for this team, for this group of guys, how to get the most out of them. That's really the key. It's not easy. That's hard to do. Sometimes you go too fast and you have to back up. Sometimes you go too slow and you're in a catch-up mode and it's hard to catch up. You want to almost on a daily basis continue to hit those sweet spots until you get to a certain point- call it halfway through the year- where you're at that point. The ship is pretty well under way. You can't go back into port and make any adjustments. You're on the voyage but you want to be in good shape when you get to that point.

http://www.patriots.com/video/2017/08/29/bill-belichick-829-ships-pretty-well-underway