Mac Jones is adding another layer to one of the strangest stretches of the Bill Belichick era, and this time the details come straight from the quarterback himself.
During a recent appearance on the "Bussin' with the Boys" podcast, Jones said the Patriots’ offensive unraveling after his rookie season started with Josh McDaniels leaving for the Raiders. That departure, he said, set off the chain reaction that helped define the final two years of Belichick’s run in Foxboro.
Jones also confirmed a rumor that had lingered for a while: Belichick was involved in the offense after McDaniels left. According to Jones, that meant more than one voice was steering the unit, and the quarterback said the arrangement was messy from the jump.
"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 confusion, Jones suggested, only made an already difficult situation worse. The Patriots had just lost McDaniels after a season that sent them back to the playoffs, and then Belichick handed the offense to Matt Patricia while also staying involved himself. Jones made it clear that the setup left the group without a clear direction.
It helps explain why New England went back to Bill O'Brien in 2023, a move that looked like an attempt to steady the offense after the 2022 mess. But the bigger picture is harder to ignore: those decisions fed into the decline that eventually led Robert Kraft to move on from Belichick after nearly 25 years.
The next season under Jerod Mayo did not fix everything, but the Patriots now appear to have the right people in place under Mike Vrabel. And with each new detail that comes out about Belichick’s final years, Kraft’s decision looks a little easier to understand, even if plenty of fans still have not forgiven him for Tom Brady leaving.
For Jones, though, the damage was already done. He was the one trying to operate inside all that uncertainty, and by his account, he got the worst of it.
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