Bill Belichick hates the NFL’s tablets so much he ranted about them for over 5 minutes

It seems like there are two extremes to a Bill Belichick press conference. He’ll either answer a question in a terse manner, or he’ll have a long monologue about a thing you didn’t know he was passionate about, like hockey or left-footed punters. Recently, Belichick had some trouble with Microsoft Surface Pro tablets — by the way, Microsoft and the NFL have a $400 million deal that requires teams to use their tablets — so much that he slammed one in Week 4:

Eventually, someone had to bring it up to him, which isn’t the first time. You might want to sit down and relax when you read what he said on Tuesday, because it’s a doozy (via NESN’s Zack Cox):

As you probably noticed, I’m done with the tablets. They’re just too undependable for me. I’m going to stick with pictures, which several of our other coaches do as well, because there just isn’t enough consistency in the performance of the tablets. I just can’t take it anymore. The other communications systems involve the press box to the coaches on the field and the coach on the field -- the signal-callers -- to the coach-quarterback, coach-signal-callers system, And those fail on a regular basis. There are very few games we play, home of away, day, night, cold, holt, preseason, regular season, postseason -- it doesn’t make any difference. There are very few games where the aren’t issues in some form or fashion with that equipment. And again, there’s a lot of equipment involved too. There’s headsets in the helmets. There’s the belt pack, that communication. There’s a hookup or a connection to an Internet service, or that process and so forth with the coaches in the press box. There’s a number of pieces of equipment. There’s a number of connections. They’re on different frequencies. Again, not that I’d know anything about this, but as it’s been explained to me, there’s a lot of things involved and inevitably, something goes wrong somewhere at some point in time. I would say weekly, we have to deal with something. Dan Famosi is our IT person, and he does a great job of handling those things. This is all league equipment, so we don’t have it. We use it, but it isn’t like we have the equipment during the week and we can work with it and say “OK, this is a problem. Let’s fix this,” or “That’s not how it works.” We get the equipment the day of the game -- or, not the day of the game, a few hours before the game. We test it and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Usually by gametime, it is working, but I would say not always. And then during the game, sometimes somthing happens and it needs to be fixed. And first of all, you have to figure out what the problem is. Is it a battery? Is it the helmet? Is it the coach’s pack? Is it the battery on the coach’s pack? It could be one of 15 different things. So I would just say there are problems in every game. There were problems last week, but there were problems the week before too. Some are worse than others. Sometimes both teams have them. Sometimes one team has them and the other team doesn’t. The equity tules that’s involves there on certain aspects of the communication systems but not all aspects, meaning what happens on one side, then the other team has to have the same. If ours are down, then theirs have to be down, and vice versa. But that’s only true in certain aspects of the communications system, not everything. Overall there’s a lot of complexity to the technology. There’s a lot of complexity in the multiple systems. I know on our end, Dan does a great job to fix those as quickly as possible. He has very limited access. I don’t know how much urgency there is for them to have everything right. I don’t know. I’m not involved with that. But, yeah. It was a problem last week. It’s basically a problem every week. The degrees aren’t always the same, but we’re usually dealing with something. But as far as the tablet goes, there was an experiment in a couple of preseason games -- it was one preseason game; we actually had two because it was our home game and Carolina’s home game -- where we had video on the tablets. But for me, personally, it’s a personal decision. I’m done with the tablets. I’ll use paper pictures from here on, because I have given it my best shot. I’ve tried to work through the process, but it just doesn’t work for me, and because there’s no consistency to it.

This apparently took five minutes and 25 seconds to get through. There are twists and turns and maybe a little existential crisis, but basically Belichick does not like the Surface Pro tablets. It’s just another illustration of how curmudgeonly he can get — remember when he told people he doesn’t like grocery shopping?

For their part, Microsoft responded to Belichick’s rant in a statement to Business Insider, which was mercifully shorter than the wall of text Belichick wrought upon this world:

“We respect Coach Belichick’s decision, but stand behind the reliability of Surface. We continue to receive positive feedback on having Surface devices on the sidelines from coaches, players and team personnel across the league. In the instances where sideline issues are reported in NFL games, we work closely with the NFL to quickly address and resolve.”

Oh, and Belichick has a granddaughter now, which is great. What do you have to say about her, Bill? (Transcript via Boston Globe’s Ben Volin):

Well, we have a roster addition to announce this morning. It's a little different than the usual one and the emphasis would be on "little." We can add newborn Blakely Rose to the depth chart. She was born this morning to my son Steve and the real "MVP" Jen, so this is a happy and exciting day for all of us.

And with that we'll move on to the Steelers.

Bill Belichick spent a whole chapter complaining about newfangled technology, while his granddaughter gets four sentences and a Steelers transition. Bill Belichick would be the worst Amazon reviewer: