With the season only 10 days away, New England seems to need only a little bit more fine-tuning before it goes out to defend its Super Bowl title.

01:00 AM EDT on Monday, August 30, 2004

BY TOM E. CURRAN
Journal Sports Writer

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- It was nearly midnight and the writers and TV crews were getting restless.

Deadlines loomed, live shots were scheduled and now Bill Belichick had chosen this time to buttonhole quarterback Tom Brady.

Three minutes stretched into five minutes as the two stood near a wall in their postgame suits, hair still wet from the shower. Meanwhile, the media waited for Brady.

Belichick knew Brady still had to talk. The coach normally likes to see those things taken care of so the team can get on the bus, on the plane and back home. But not this time. It wasn't an animated discussion but it looked like business.

The point of all this? The tenor of preseason changed Saturday night. There are 10 days before the season opener against the Colts and time is now precious. Thursday, the Patriots will play Jacksonville, wiping out a chance to practice that day, as well as the day before and after. They also won't practice next Wednesday.

So the Patriots can maybe run six practices before they begin defending their Super Bowl title. And if a deadline is missed so Belichick can get some things said to his quarterback, there's little doubt the defending coach of the year will still sleep soundly.

"We are on a fast track here," Belichick said on a conference call yesterday afternoon. "We are trying to push through it in terms of getting ready for a couple games and dealing with the personnel situations and decisions. I feel like we are kind of on a treadmill that is going at a pretty good pace."

Aside from getting ready for the Colts (and the Jaguars), New England has cuts to make by the end of business tomorrow to get down to just 65 active players on its roster.

"We have to do something with a very small number of players -- I would say probably less than five -- in terms of either releasing them or putting them on some type of list," Belichick said.

Because this is a talented collection of football players, players at the bottom of the roster who may seem expendable are actually pretty promising and talented. And Belichick, who doesn't seem the type to discard players easily, is going to make his decisions carefully.

"It is not really just about the 53-man roster, " he said. "There is an eight-man practice squad, and part of the evaluations are the guys you don't keep who you want to try to get on your practice squad. There is probably going to be a point in time somewhere where we will want or need to bring people back on the team that won't make the final 53. We can't keep them all, (but the team needs to) continue to evaluate players that could potentially be on your active roster, whether it is on a re-signing basis or on a practice squad basis."

"It is not like high school where you have a graduation day and everyone gets their diploma and that is it," he added. "It is the final cut, but you are going to be hearing from a lot of these guys again, one way or another, either on this team or in the league. So it is another game to evaluate that."

As for the game Saturday that the Patriots ultimately lost, 20-17, on a touchdown pass with 1:48 remaining, Belichick felt the intensity of it was good preparation and that the performance was a needed improvement as the preseason winds down.

Echoing that, Brady said, "We got off to a much better start. That was encouraging and there were some good things that happened. We moved the ball well. I would have liked to have had some throws back and I missed some open guys, but we ran the ball better, threw the ball better and produced better. We're not where we need to be but we're getting closer."

With time running out, they need to.