Before we begin, please turn your attention to New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, wondering whether there are any Boston-area high school lacrosse teams with an opening on the coaching staff.
That video is from the Patriots’ 38-3 loss at Dallas on Sunday, the worst of Belichick’s tenure in New England by margin of defeat. This epic facepalm occurred right after quarterback Mac Jones, momentarily forgetting that he is not John Elway, slung one of the derpiest passes you’ll ever see, launching the ball across his body only to watch it be easily and predictably intercepted by Cowboys cornerback DaRon Bland and returned for a touchdown. (Bland would pick him off again before Jones was benched for Bailey Zappe in the third quarter.)
That play, and Belichick’s reaction to it, represent rock bottom for the Patriots. And the biggest shock of all is that Matt Patricia is no longer around to become the scapegoat.
The Patriots entered the season with a questionable ceiling but a relatively easy task if they wanted to become a serious NFL team again: They simply needed to improve on the offensive—use either meaning—disaster class that was last season. This seemed almost impossible to screw up. Patricia and Joe Judge were replaced by Bill O’Brien, a professional offensive coordinator. Yet a month into the season, the offense is arguably worse, averaging minus-0.19 expected points added per play, according to TruMedia. Last year’s team averaged minus-0.08. It is currently the 29th-ranked offense in the NFL by total EPA, and a league-worst—league-disgustingest, league–terrible, horrible, no good, very baddest!—71 percent of its drives are ending in a punt or turnover.
Many specific complaints from last year linger, despite the change in play callers. New England has run just 26 plays with play-action and 247 without it, despite averaging 4 yards more per attempt with play-action than without. The run-pass option game, which was expected to be a strength of this offense under O’Brien, has been stifled because of the offensive line’s poor performance and the fact that defenses are consistently loading the box because they are not afraid Jones will beat them deep. Jones is tied for 30th among quarterbacks in plays of 20 or more yards even though he’s tied for 11th among starters in average intended air yards (8.2), according to Next Gen Stats; put simply, he’s trying to take what defenses are giving him downfield but failing at it. Entering the Cowboys game, Jones was fourth in attempts against single-high safety looks and first in attempts against Cover 1 on third downs. Opponents simply don’t believe this New England offense can beat them down the field when it needs to.
But the worst of it, to me, is that they’re just messy. On Sunday, facing a third-and-1 from the 6, the Belichick-Jones-O’Brien brain trust elected to throw to the end zone and then kick a field goal. They bungled an attempt to run the tush push quarterback sneak, which Jones isn’t athletic enough to execute anyway. They’re a middle-of-the-pack team when it comes to penalties, but pre-snap flags have been an issue, and these unforced errors are largely why the Patriots have the eighth-worst penalty yard differential. They have the 27th-worst turnover differential, at minus-5.
Last week, Judge, who has the nebulous title of assistant head coach, gifted all the players sweatshirts with the team logo on the front and the words “No one is coming; it’s up to us” on the back. Is that supposed to be good news? The Patriots started the year with a solid defense but are now without their top three cornerbacks (Jack Jones, Marcus Jones, and first-rounder Christian Gonzalez, who was injured on Sunday) and their best pass rusher (Matthew Judon), who is reportedly out indefinitely with a torn biceps. The offensive line has been a revolving door of backups after New England’s willingness to spend in free agency maxed out at $5 million for Riley Reiff and $4 million guaranteed for Calvin Anderson this offseason. They have no third-down back in the mold of James White. (Ezekiel Elliott was a splashy running back signing in name only; he’s got just 138 rushing yards and no touchdowns in four games.) The Patriots have no depth at critical positions like receiver and cornerback. The one dynamic playmaker is a sixth-round receiver who was benched following a fumble two weeks ago and remains buried in the offense. Jakobi Meyers, the one receiver the Patriots have actually developed in the past decade, is playing well in Las Vegas while earning just slightly more than what the Patriots are paying JuJu Smith-Schuster, who is averaging career lows in yards per game (20) and catch rate (52.4 percent).
I’m not sure that “No one is coming” is the most self-aware message to be sending when the team’s failures start with roster construction.
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There are some short-term Band-Aids available. The offense can run more play-action, something Jones said last week would happen “with time.” Demario Douglas, the aforementioned rookie receiver who, fumbles aside, is the best separator on the offense, could take on a bigger role. They could stop turning the ball over. Beyond that, the Patriots’ biggest challenge is a big-picture one, which is complicated by the amount of hardware on display in Foxborough: They are not good enough to win the way they always used to—on the margins and with discipline.
Lately, though, while things have gone badly on the field, New England has leaned into its greatest hits off the field. The highlight of the season thus far was Tom Brady’s homecoming ceremony on opening day, complete with one last run out of the tunnel and one final “Let’s fucking go!” The second-best moment was when the team debuted its big new video screen at Gillette Stadium. Since Brady left the team, Belichick has developed a tendency to refer to the historical scoreboard when asked questions about the organization’s present failures.
Belichick entered the season 19 wins short of breaking Don Shula’s record of 347 career victories, another lifetime achievement award that has loomed over the team’s trajectory of late. About a quarter of the way through the season, he is now … 18 wins short of Shula’s record. Unless they’re planning a ceremony for the fall of 2027, the Patriots have two options as far as meeting this goal goes: to get better or to give up on it.
“Look, I’d like him to break Don Shula’s record, but I’m not looking for any of our players to get great stats,” team owner Robert Kraft said this spring. “We’re about winning and doing whatever we can to win. That’s what our focus is now. And it’s very important to me that we make the playoffs.”
The season is young, but the Patriots’ playoff chances are looking slim, and Belichick’s job security has become a hot topic in New England and among national media. Kraft tends to be pretty sentimental, which makes me think Belichick is not yet on the hot seat, even if he misses the postseason again. Kraft’s son Jonathan, however, might be more results oriented, and Robert joined Jonathan in signing a letter to season-ticket holders last January that stressed “critical evaluations of all elements of our football operation as we strive to make the playoffs next year.” The Boston Globe reported that Jonathan “passionately defends and protects Jones” and noted that the quarterback has been one of only a few current players to be a fixture at the Krafts’ summer parties in the Hamptons and Cape Cod. I’m inclined to believe Belichick will return in 2024 if he wants to, but his future really could go either way and obviously depends on what happens over the next few months.
Belichick has earned this patience because of his career achievements. It’s also possible, though, that for as long as he’s around, the Patriots will be a little delusional about how good they are. I don’t think Belichick woke up one day in the past couple of years and forgot how to coach, but his enduring presence may be hurting the team simply because it allows the organization to cosplay as competitive when it just isn’t. Three years into Jones’s tenure, the team has failed to take advantage of having a quarterback on a rookie contract; they haven’t surrounded Jones with talent in the same way that, say, the Bengals did for Joe Burrow or the Dolphins did for Tua Tagovailoa. New England will have to make a decision on whether to pick up Jones’s fifth-year option after this year, and it can’t rationally make that commitment to him and expect better results without making further commitments to improve the talent around him. That seems like a recipe for disaster, but the alternative is rebuilding, which runs counter to the Kraft playoff mandate.
It feels like a team coached by Belichick—the guy who went 11-5 with Matt Cassel!—shouldn’t be downright bad, even though we have living proof that it is indeed possible. But there are worse things in the NFL than being a bad team, and chief among them is being a bad team that thinks it isn’t.
