Well, that was decisive.
Less than an hour after the Patriots' final game of the season ended, the team fired first-year head coach Jerod Mayo.
The decision caps a stunning slide over New England's final four games, as owner Robert Kraft and team president Jonathan Kraft pirouetted from their "come hell-or-high-water" support of Mayo.
In early December, when speculation about Mayo’s job security began, a high-ranking team source was asked if the team could conceivably move on.
“What are we talking about, losing every game 90-0? Yeah, then I guess there’d be a possibility,” was the reply.
The inference was that Mayo was safe unless the collapse was total and catastrophic. And it was. All the way through to Sunday’s more-harm-than-good victory over the Buffalo Bills.
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The post-Brady years have been wild for the Patriots. The 51 games since the start of the 2022 season have been embarrassing.
The team’s descent to laughingstock came with astounding speed.
Ownership let Bill Belichick do whatever he wanted until last January because he’d “earned the right” to author his own ending. Empowered by his two decades of accomplishments and the notion “the past 25 years” afforded him lifetime immunity from oversight, Belichick drove the franchise off a cliff.
The Krafts got their team back but spent 2024 realizing how far they’ve fallen.
They were tethered to a first-year head coach; a fleet of first-time-in-the-position assistant coaches and coordinators; a front office more adept at laying blame and lying low than actually bringing in players who are helpful; and the worst roster in the league.
After swimming from the wreckage of Belichick to the driftwood that was Jerod Mayo and general manager Eliot Wolf, the team had better hope it has a lifeboat to crawl into.
Speculation will immediately (and rightly) pivot to former Patriots player and ex-Titans head coach Mike Vrabel as Mayo’s successor. Of all the possible candidates, Vrabel is the only one who has the meaningful head coaching experience the team needs, a proven knack for working well with bloodthirsty media and a link to the early days of the Patriots dynasty.
If the Patriots aren’t pivoting to Vrabel -- and it’s been exceedingly quiet down there on all fronts -- then the likely painful decision to pivot from Mayo is a little absurd.
Last Monday, after the abhorrent loss to the Chargers, this was the inescapable truth I arrived at.
The Krafts are very clearly out of practice in how to run the football side of the football franchise.
Bill Belichick ran the franchise. Personnel department. Draft. Scouting. Cap. Spending. Coaches. Players. Public messaging. He made the decisions, and -- while the Krafts would definitely tsk-tsk and shake their heads when they went poorly -- they let him make them until they decided he’d forfeited that right.
But it’s come clear in the past 11 months that they literally didn’t replace Belichick. They elevated someone to coach the team. They elevated someone to run personnel. But there’s no one person leading the organization giving a coherent, concrete message and vision for what the team’s trying to do. The aim of the “collaborative” effort is to get better and lay a foundation. Even if you squint really hard, it’s hard to see the progress.. …
If this season was about gathering information post-Belichick, diagnosing issues and charting a course back to mediocrity, then the time for observing and data-gathering is over.
The time to decide a path and articulate it -- not some ambiguous 'Trying to get better…" flim-flam -- has arrived. What’s it gonna be?
The Patriots’ historic run of success from 2001 to 2019 under Belichick left them understandably reliant (addicted?) to their familiar way of doing things.
The team wasn’t just held up as a model for how to run an NFL franchise, but how to run a successful corporation. The team transcended sports. But fissures began appearing in 2017, and the team became siloed, paranoid and stagnant.
Ownership was loathe to intervene too heavily, hoping that tweaks and lever pulls would suffice in having the franchise return to prominence. It never worked. And when the Patriots moved on from Belichick last January, they still were loathe to intervene too heavily, hiring Mayo -- in large part -- because they knew him best.
They whistled past the graveyard thinking someone with so little experience could succeed with a gutted roster and inexperienced assistants/personnel people he didn’t know, the way so many head coaches do when they begin.
Where decisiveness and urgency were needed, the Patriots were shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. They've been attaching "We’ll see how it goes …" to major decisions for half a decade.
Moving on from Mayo that fast if there’s a more cogent plan in place shows the urgency lacking. If there is no cogent plan in place -- and we’ll find out quickly if there is -- then this was a panic move that could do more harm than good.
Sunday’s win against the Bills already did some damage. In winning 23-16, the Patriots cut off their nose to spite their face. They threw the baby out with the bathwater.
The team with the consensus worst roster in the NFL blew its chance to either, A) Take the best player in college football or, B) Set up a top-pick bidding war and collect assets.
The short-term high of winning would have been gone by morning. The hangover for the next few months is going to be a killer. How much simpler life would be -- how much better position would the team be in -- if it was selecting first in the 2025 NFL Draft rather than fourth?
They can think about that at the NFL Combine and every Pro Day from now until spring. They left who they’ll end up with to chance.
Full disclosure: Last week, I said the Patriots should play every backup and bit player, then play the game normally. If they were in position to win, they needed to play it straight and let the chips fall where they may. Sounded better in theory than watching it actually play out.
I’ll also add, the Patriots didn’t tinker enough. They didn’t engineer the loss. Antonio Gibson was the Patriots' best running back this season (just as Ezekiel Elliott was last season). He played far more than backup Terrell Jennings. Javon Baker saw one throw. He should have seen a half-dozen.
The Patriots should have done more to ensure the result that was BEST FOR THE FOOTBALL TEAM AND ORGANIZATION. Not the players. But the message should have come from on high -- or simply been friggin’ understood -- that finishing the day with the No. 1 pick in hand after a noble performance was ideal.
THAT would have been a win. Couldn’t do it.
Smart people will disagree with huffy dismissals of ever losing on purpose. Yeah, well. If you’re giving your all, Drake Maye’s playing all game. People are OK with playing footsie by not giving full and total effort but recoil at embracing the loss? To me, that’s virtue-signaling, boolah-boolah bulls---.
Ironically, the Bills were more overt about letting the Patriots have this one with their game management. It was like they were saying, “They already dumbed into Maye last year and he’s their best player … do we want to let them dumb into the best player this April too? Let’s keep them right where they are…”
One other note worth mentioning: the value of the No. 1 overall pick isn’t as high as it was last year. The quarterback class this year is weak. There’s no consensus “generational” player. It might have been hard for the Patriots to get a king’s ransom in a deal. Still, they would have definitely had a shot at the most intriguing and electric player in the draft in Travis Hunter. Now? Probably not. They’ll get a good player. But they won’t run the top of the draft.
All the close games that would have been helpful and productive for the Patriots to win this year -- Seattle, Miami, Tennessee, Rams, Colts, Bills 1.0 -- they lost. Then, after losing all those, when a win is the last thing they really wanted? They win.
All the other three-win teams did what they were supposed to. Brown, Giants, Titans. They all dutifully lost. Only the Patriots among them didn’t understand the mission. And they deserve every single snort of derision they’ll get from one side of the country to the other for the rest of the offseason.
The Patriots have heard the derision, especially from their own fans. They made a decisive move. But it was just the first of what has to be a measured and disciplined two-step process.
