Bill Belichick on a potential Julian Edelman return: ‘You’d have to ask Julian’
The Patriots coach said he keeps in touch with Edelman 'fairly regularly'.
Julian Edelman misses football and hasn’t ruled out making a comeback later in the season, he said last week on The Rich Eisen Show.
“I’ll tell you right now, if I had three weeks, three maybe four weeks,” Edelman said. “I mean, at the start of the season absolutely not. But, if there was a team vying for a playoff run, guy goes down, could I get ready? I probably could.”
Belichick was asked about Edelman’s comments Monday on WEEI’s The Greg Hill Show.
“I talk to Julian, I talk to him fairly regularly,” Belichick said. “So yeah, I don’t know about him talking to Rich Eisen and all that, you’d have to ask Julian, I don’t know.”
Edelman, who retired in 2020 after 12 seasons with the Patriots, said that the year off gave his body time to heal which made him miss football now more than he did last year.
He spent most of the 2020 season on injured reserve and was cut after he failed a physical in 2021. He retired shortly after being released.
“This is my first year my body has felt kind of pretty good,” Edelman said. “That’s when you start to get back in that mindset of when the game was easiest for you, when you were in your best physical shape and it cross-paired with your smarts of the game. And that’s when you miss it, when you can go out and compete at a high level consistently.”
As the Patriots wrap up the preseason this week in Las Vegas, Edelman said he misses the excitement that a new football season brings.
“I miss waking up in August, going to the field smelling the fresh cut grass,” Edelman said. “Seeing the sprinklers just finished, seeing our equipment guys set the stuff out in the locker room. The fellas, competition, and now being in my second year out I can actually miss it.”
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