Are you Team Belichick or Team Mayo?
For better or worse, that's become part of the discourse after the New England Patriots' 32-16 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars in London. That humiliating defeat led head coach Jerod Mayo to declare the Patriots a "soft football team across the board," which led his predecessor, Bill Belichick, to defend his former players with a bit of revisionist history.
Ex-Patriots safety Devin McCourty has been watching all of this drama from afar, and he wants it to stop.
"I hate to see the way that when Mayo speaks, it kind of ... gets turned into, ‘Well he’s kind of taking a shot at Bill.’ Bill speaks, he’s kind of taking a shot at Mayo," McCourty told Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio.
"These two -- we used to call Jerod, ‘Jerod Belichick.’ We used to say he was like Bill’s long-lost son because of how he was and how similar he was to Bill as a player, so I hate to see the way this has all unfolded that they’re not kind of close and Jerod can’t call up Bill as a former colleague, as a coach, and then as your former head coach.
"I hate that part of this, so hopefully they work this out and we stop seeing these kind of subtle shots back and forth in the media.”
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Mayo admitted this offseason he hadn't spoken to Belichick since replacing the legendary head coach in January, so there's clearly some distance between the two that may have made it easier for Belichick to criticize his former linebacker and assistant coach.
But while McCourty initially chastised Mayo for calling out his players instead of accepting responsibility for his team's struggles, McCourty thought Belichick was being a bit disingenuous when he said he felt "bad" for Patriots players (and also failed to mention several key absences on the team's defense).
"I’ve never heard Bill say he felt bad or felt hurt for any player, so that kind of was funny to me,” McCourty said. "But it is interesting because they also don’t have Ja’Whaun Bentley, they don’t have Christian Barmore, and I think one of the things that always sticks out to me is Coach Belichick always telling us, ‘Don’t tell me about what you did last year. Each team’s different. Each season’s different.'"
Mayo is getting quite the crash course in coaching this season; his team has lost six straight, his players are questioning each other's commitment in public and he's taking heat from his former boss. A win would go a long way toward helping Mayo right the ship, but even against the 2-5 New York Jets, the Patriots enter Week 8 as seven-point underdogs.
