Trading Mac Jones is a move that had to happen, no matter whose fault you think the current situation is.
To whatever extent you believe the Patriot Way actually exists in real life, all it really shakes out to is a cool-sounding history-is-written-by-the-victors way of saying “accountability matters.”
Do your job, and no days off, and all that is a more meathead way of saying “get the results people are counting on you to get, by putting in the work and taking it seriously and doing everything in your power to excel, because then everyone else can do what they’re supposed to do, and that’s how you get a whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts”. I’m getting dangerously close to LinkedIn buzzword territory here, but, you get the idea.
That’s what eventually led to Bill Belichick’s departure after 23 years, six Super Bowl championships, and a reign of sheer terror over the rest of the NFL that lasted so long, fans of other AFC teams born in the 90s could barely even dream of their team making the Super Bowl until a few years ago. Then the signature recipe stopped being an automatic ticket to conference championship weekend, and enough of the dice rolls Belichick made came up snake eyes that there was simply no way the Patriots could bring him back next year and beyond without de-facto admitting that results don’t matter as much as the name on your office door and all the great memories do. That famous film-room hyper-analyzing the star QB just like the long snapper and the punt protection guys doesn’t quite hit the same when the head coach is delivering a number of wins in a year that you can count on one hand.
And that brings us to Mac Jones, the man drafted to succeed the greatest quarterback in the history of the sport, and also kind of an experiment on whether a straight-up pocket passer with good-not-great tools can still tear up the modern NFL like Tom and Peyton used to.
Turns out, the answer to that question is, “well, we can’t TOTALLY rule it out, because Brock Purdy exists, but if it’s even possible, it’s really frickin’ hard and pretty much 100 other things have to fall into place exactly right if this thing’s going to actually work out!”
There was a stretch early on with Mac Jones where it was legitimately looking like “……holy s–t, did we just pull a Green Bay Packers and find ANOTHER BAMF QB right after our other one bounced? This is living!”
You remember the games. Going toe-to-toe with Tom Brady in the GOAT’s return to Foxboro with the Bucs, and almost pulling off the upset. Taking Dak Prescott and the Dallas Cowboys to a heart-stopping overtime and running up the score on the Cleveland Browns, the New York Jets, the Tennessee Titans, the Jacksonville Jaguars, and the Atlanta Falcons like the good times never had to end. Shoot, at that point, half the conversation with Mac was “is Josh McDaniels’ cowardly play-calling holding Mac back? Enough with the bubble screens! Let him cook! The kid can sling it!”
Even getting an atomic wedgie on national television in the playoffs at the hands of the Buffalo Bills didn’t really send most Pats fans crashing down to earth like you might expect. Sure it’s embarrassing, and there were more than a few moments where you couldn’t help but watch Josh Allen and think “dang it must be awesome to have a QB like that who makes Captain America look like Marty McFly”, but Mac was a rookie whose best receiving option was either Hunter Henry or Jakobi Meyers, right? Get the kid the real-deal X-receiver that Tom Brady never got after Randy Moss, and bake in a little natural second-year leap, and boom baby! 10-win floor every season for the next decade, right?
Um. Yeah. About that… By god, that’s Freezing Cold Takes’ music!
And then, as the casuals’ takes go, Bill screwed Mac. Broke him. Set him up to fail. You know the list of Festivus grievances better than you know your own grocery list by now. Cole Strange and Tyquan Thornton. Playing the game on hard mode for no reason with Nelson Agholor and DeVante Parker as the outside receivers. Kendrick Bourne somehow being banished to Azkaban. The Matt Patricia of it all. Trying to do a complete offensive overhaul to the ShanaBro scheme that half of the NFL is still running today, except with a bunch of guys with no connection to the Shanahans and no real experience teaching it.
But since we don’t do casual takes here at Pats Pulpit dot com, we know it’s never that simple. If it was, then the fix we all thought would be a full-health potion of “add a real NFL offensive coordinator” would have shot the Patriots right back to double-digit wins, rendering 2022 a one-off mistake that we’d all be laughing about for years.
Somewhere along the way, though, Mac Jones got lost.
It’s not like he suddenly forgot how to football, but even taking the preposterous situation he woke up to in 2022 into account, after the gnarly high ankle sprain that he almost certainly came back too soon from, he was never the same. Even taking the goofy two-left-feet offensive scheme into account, the razor-sharp pre-snap analysis and quick decision making that had Jones looking wise beyond his years in 2021 was gone. Again, PatriciaBall™ is partially to blame, but throws were either hurried and forced or too late and into tight coverage, and then the whole offense kind of became an ouroboros of paranoia and frustration.
On one hand, Mac’s right; f–king quick game DOES suck. On the other hand — and under no circumstances do you “gotta hand it to Matt Patricia” — but you can kind of see his side, at least a little bit, because you can almost hear him thinking “well, everything besides quick game we do just keeps going wrong, soooo…”
Whatever percentage of blame you want to assign to Bill, Matt, and Mac is up to you, but no rational human watcher of football who cares about this team would chalk Mac up to 0 percent. If he got rattled or got the yips or whatever else you want to call it after the Chicago Bears game where he was benched on Monday Night Football for the world to see, that’s on him.
If he was checked out for the rest of the season after some of the fans fell in love with Bailey Zappe, or if he just stopped caring because of the offense’s tendency to look like a 10-year-old playing Madden, that’s also on him. If his internal clock or instincts or spider-sense or whatever you want to call it kept getting worse, to the point where in his final six games in 2022, he never even cracked 250 passing yards, guess whose fault that is? Part of it is coaching, sure, but you’re the guy holding the ball every play.
That brings us to 2023, and all the way back around to the whole “accountability and expectations” thing. Apparently, Bill O’Brien rejoining the Patriots wasn’t exactly Bill Belichick’s first choice, or his choice at all, but that almost doesn’t matter. Billy O’s system is famously pretty demanding of quarterbacks and puts a lot on their plate, but it also gives them so many opportunities to go out there and cook. Empty formations. Motion and formational trickery that should give you a leg up on the defense every time. Almost always having a vertical route as your first read, which, I’ve never played quarterback, but I would have to imagine would get a hearty “Hell yeah brother!” from any QB that lives to sling the kind of bombs that SportsCenter Top 10s are made of.
It should have at least gotten the Patriots offense back to mid.
Instead, well, you watched the games. If you told me Mac Jones was making some of these decisions and throws after a full day of Drinking Games Yard Olympics, I would have literally no rebuttal.
We’ll get to the wide receivers in a second, but the awkward truth is Mac was out there doing things that no NFL quarterback not named Zach Wilson should ever be doing. And once defenses figured out that Mac was either in way over his head, or trying to do the ol’ “get it all back in one play” routine every snap, they played the New England Patriots straight up disrespectfully. Because they could. Defenses barely even had to bait Mac into mistakes. He was making them just fine on his own.
I can’t find the thread of tweets now to save my life, but Patriots OG Dynasty alum Matt Chatham summed it up best: even if you account for receivers that couldn’t separate from Pac-12 corners, drops, bad and/or nonexistent pass protection, and linemen looking like they’d never seen a blitz in their life, there are still NFL quarterback things almost every play that Mac Jones either cannot or would not do.
Sometimes that’s reading a defense a certain way. Sometimes it’s making a certain type of throw (or knowing when that cross-body back-across-the-formation throw to the left is a really, REALLY bad idea). Sometimes it’s making the pre-snap adjustments to not get your clock cleaned. Sometimes it’s knowing your arm only has the juice to hit that deep post-corner once in a blue moon. The list goes on and on. And whether Mac was mentally fried at this point, so afraid to make a mistake that he paralyzed himself by overanalyzing, or simply didn’t have any f–ks left to give, it made watching the offense a Saw movie every weekend.
Of course, he ended up getting benched again, this time for good, following a two-interception performance against the New York Giants. And this offseason, with a three-year body of work to his name, is where the whole “accountability” thing comes in. It can be as simple as, “Every year since you got here, objectively speaking, you got worse.”
More important, though, is if the team and the organization is going to have ANY shot at recapturing the excellence-or-die-trying culture that defined the Dynasty, you cannot give the keys to the most important position in American sports back to the guy who, for two straight years now, has played so atrociously that he’s giving away whole games by himself. You cannot preach “Do Your Job, or we’ll give it to someone else,” and talk about playoffs and championship expectations, and then give infinite chances to Mac Jones just because he’s the national champion, first-round quarterback and it’s his job.
Mac had to go, no matter who coaches the 2024 New England Patriots, because how are you going to look the rest of the roster and everyone else in the building that busts their ass, day in and day out, in the eye, and say, “Yup, that’s our guy, that’s our quarterback, who definitely won’t crush any chance of contending we have this season before it even starts. He deserves another chance”.
That’s unserious team behavior, like everyone Patriots fans have clowned on for so many years. It’s the classic definition of insanity, doing the same thing and expecting different results, just because hey, we invested the 15th pick in this kid. Sunk cost fallacy and refusing to let your draft takes die is like 80 percent of how bad teams stay bad.
After 2023, it had to be this way. The Patriots couldn’t run it back with Mac Jones with a straight face, and even though it really, REALLY stinks to have to take an L this bad, it’d only be signing up for another season of embarrassing yourselves in new and creative ways to try it again. At least Eliot Wolf was able to get some pennies on the dollar in return, and an opportunity to draft The Guy at pick No. 3 (hopefully) doesn’t come along every day.
Good luck and good health to Mac Jones in Jacksonville, and here’s hoping it works out better for everyone that way.
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