These are testing times and testy times for Bill Belichick.

You would think a man coming off three Super Bowl victories in the past four seasons would be a bit relaxed, especially when he’s returning all but one offensive starter and all but two defensive starters from the team that ran out to meet, greet and defeat the Philadelphia Eagles last February in Super Bowl XXXIX.

But Belichick likes nothing more than to be miserable, and so, with a new season less than two weeks away, he is in his element. His defense is in the midst of an upheaval. He is without both of his trusted coordinators for the first time since he arrived in New England six years ago. He lost his top three inside linebackers to retirement before training camp opened.

He has problems.

For a guy who has to control who seeds the lawns at Gillette Stadium, these are difficult times, and when he’s asked about them and what it all may mean this season, that’s what he becomes. Difficult, because, after all, WHAT BUSINESS IS IT OF YOURS?!

Recently Belichick was asked if the changes he faces this year were more than the norm for a league in which free agency has made every year a new frontier. This was not an illogical line of inquiry because, while teams lose players all the time, they don’t often lose both their offensive and defensive coordinators in the same offseason, as well as all their starting inside linebackers.

Belichick pondered that for a moment. Then he pounced.

“I don’t know what ‘normal’ is,” he snapped.

Anyone who’s spent much time around him wouldn’t argue with him on that point, but then he continues.

“It’s a long season,” he said. “There’ll be things that will happen this year that we won’t be able to predict now or project. That’s just the way it is. Every team will go through that. If we had been sitting here last year and you had told me that Troy Brown would have played on our sub defense the whole second half of the season and Randall Gay and Asante Samuel would have been our starting corners, when healthy, for the majority of the season, I would have looked at you like you were crazy. I have no idea what’s going to happen or how it’s going to go or anything else. We’ll do what we think is best for the team and evaluate it on a day-by-day and a week-by-week basis. We’ll do what we think is best for those situations. That’s the same way we’ve always done it. There’s nothing new there.”

Nothing new there. A 34-year-old, untested Eric Mangini, calling the plays on defense for the first time in his life. No one replacing departed offensive coordinator Charlie Weis, so Belichick is publicly claiming responsibility while a 29-year-old QB coach named Josh McDaniels, who was picking guys up at the airport just four years ago in New England, calls in the plays to Tom Brady and may even call a few himself.

Nothing new there. Nothing but everything.

But we digress from the normal.

“I don’t know what normal is,” the defending Super Bowl champion coach reminds. “You can go back and look at the past few years. We all know what it was last year. We all know what it was the year before that and the year before that. There are always going to be changes.”

True enough, but change often means abnormalities, does it not?

Not if you’re trapped inside Bill Belichick’s world because that is a place where nothing is normal but, then again, nothing is abnormal either.

Nothing is nothing, which is all he wants you to know about his team.

Nothing.

With Monty Beisel and Chad Brown replacing Tedy Bruschi, Ted Johnson and Roman Phifer, he has two guys who have never played inside linebacker in a 3-4 defense stepping in for one guy who was the heart of the defense (Bruschi), one who was the prototypical run-stuffing inside linebacker (Johnson) and one who was the stereotypical wise old pro (Phifer). Is it not to be expected that the new guys who have never played inside linebacker in the 3-4 will be less productive for a while than three guys who had years of experience at it and played at a level proficient enough to make the Patriots’ defense one of the stingiest in the league during its three Super Bowl seasons since 2001?

That depends on whom you ask. If you ask Bill Belichick, don’t expect a normal answer. Expect a lecture.

“What difference does it make?” he snorts when asked if it’s realistic to expect Beisel and Brown to play as mistake-free as Bruschi, Johnson and Phifer.

It doesn’t make a difference?

“There’s 11 people out there playing defense,” he reminds his bewildered and bemused audience. “What makes a difference is how those 11 people play. That’s what defense is about. It’s about team defense. You’re always trying to isolate it into one player, one situation or one thing, and it just doesn’t work that way. I don’t know. How did you think the defense was last year?”

That, of course, is the point. Last year the defense was very good, especially around the goal line. That defense had Bruschi making plays, Johnson stuffing runs and Phifer smelling out the opponent’s best-laid plans.

It was good enough to win a third Super Bowl in four years, but that defense is not this defense, and Beisel and Brown are not experienced in either the demands of the 3-4 inside linebacker or of the always-changing Belichick defensive scheme.

Or are they?

“Neither one of those players (Beisel and Brown) have been around here long enough, I think, to fully evaluate that,” Belichick said. “In some cases, we’re still dealing with things that we haven’t seen before. We haven’t dealt with every play that they’re going to run against us, even in the three weeks that we’ve been in camp. I think we’ve hit a high percentage of them, but certainly not all of them. So there are going to be things that are going to come up that we haven’t even dealt with yet. I don’t know how all of that is going to turn out. I wish I did. If you could tell me how that is going to go, then that would help my planning down the road.

“I don’t know and I don’t think anybody knows where their team is three weeks into training camp. I think you have a lot better idea after six regular-season games. That’s when I think it starts to really come together. I’ve said that a thousand times. That’s when it really starts to declare, when people game-plan you. When you try to use your strengths (against their weaknesses). When you try to deal with their strengths and try to compensate for areas where you might not be as strong.

“How all of that will play out, what you can get done, how they match up against it, I think that’s a whole different ballgame. I don’t know that now and I don’t think anybody else does either. They (his inquisitors) may think they do. We’ll see. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re not. We aren’t going to see until the teams get out there and put four, five or six competitive NFL regular-season games out there against any aspect of your team.”

In other words, Bill Belichick’s team isn’t in midseason form yet, but he is. On a late August afternoon, he’s surly, difficult and looking for trouble where none exists, looking even when the simple thing would have been just to say, “It’s too early to tell, but replacing Bruschi, Romeo (Crennel), Charlie (Weis) and those other guys won’t be easy.”

That would have been a normal answer, but, as we now know, Bill Belichick doesn’t know what “normal” is. Maybe that’s why he’s won three Super Bowls in the past four years. There’s nothing normal about that, either.

Ron Borges is a columnist for the Boston Globe. 

The above content is featured from our Pro Football Weekly print edition — Issue 09.