Mac Jones is putting a little more daylight on one of the messiest stretches of the Patriots’ recent history, and the picture he described on the “Bussin' with the Boys” podcast is not a flattering one for the final years of Bill Belichick’s run in New England.
Jones said the turning point came after his rookie season, when Josh McDaniels left for the Raiders after helping guide the Patriots back to the playoffs. From there, Jones said, the offense entered a stretch of confusion that never really got sorted out.
The biggest revelation was Jones confirming a longtime rumor: Belichick was involved in running the offense after McDaniels departed. According to Jones, that wasn’t just a background presence. It created a situation where nobody seemed fully in charge.
“At first, Bill was going to call the plays. Which I was like, 'Alright, this is kind of fun.
Let's see how this goes.' He took it over, and we kind of didn't know where we were going.
There was three people in the meeting, who stands up to talk to the offense? They didn't really know.”
That lines up with how the Patriots’ offense looked once Matt Patricia was handed the play-calling job. The move was widely viewed as a bad fit, and Jones said the problem went beyond Patricia alone. With multiple voices in the room and no clear direction, the quarterback was left trying to operate in a setup that seemed to be changing on the fly.
Jones’ comments also help explain why the Patriots brought Bill O'Brien back in 2023. The move looked like a reset attempt, a way to steady an offense that had gone off the rails. It didn’t work out that way.
In the bigger picture, those decisions fed into the end of Belichick’s tenure and eventually led Robert Kraft to move on after nearly 25 years. The next season under Jerod Mayo didn’t produce much improvement, though the Patriots now appear to have the right people in place under Mike Vrabel.
For Jones, though, the fallout hit first and hardest. He was the one trying to play quarterback in the middle of all that uncertainty, and the more he talks, the clearer it becomes how unstable things were behind the scenes.
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