Well, after three weeks of harshly criticizing the Red Sox and their mystifying front-office moves, it’s time to look slightly south and set the target on another laughably underachieving team — the New England Patriots.
After completely botching the final play of last week’s game against former offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels and his Las Vegas Raiders, the Pats sit in third place in the AFC East with a 7-7 record heading into Saturday’s matchup with the defending AFC champions, the Cincinnati Bengals, who have won six straight after a puzzling 2-4 start.
Need we remind you that last year’s New England team actually reached the playoffs, while this year’s edition has taken huge steps back, not only in performance but in aura, and the Patriots’ seven wins this season have been against the 6-8 Steelers, the 7-7 Lions (who had entered that NE game with a 1-3 mark, though they are much better now), the 6-8 Browns, the 7-8 Jets (twice), the 4-9-1 Colts, and the 4-10 Cardinals.
Now, with the Patriots’ dim playoff hopes on the line, only the most devoted local fans can imagine their beloved team knocking off any of their three remaining opponents: the Bengals, the AFC-leading Bills (11-3), or the 8-6 Dolphins, who opened this season by spanking New England, 20-7. Subsequently, a 7-10 season for the Patriots seems rather likely, a year after the team had the opposite record.
Admittedly, this organization is just under four years removed from its sixth Super Bowl title of the 2000s, but after four seasons without you-know-who slinging the ball for the Patriots, it has become reasonably clear that that fellow who wore jersey No. 12 for two decades in Foxboro was probably the main reason that the team enjoyed such unbridled success — and don’t believe for a second he is coming back anytime soon — and that the franchise without him doesn’t look remotely like those dynastic teams of the past 20 years.
Maybe three down years is too short a time to make rash judgments, but I am about to make a statement that many around here will consider heresy: perhaps it is time to clean house among the coaching staff, including the grand poobah himself, one William Stephen Belichick.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, hear me out.
Let’s begin with Belichick’s misreading of the Tom Brady situation back in 2020. Belichick had coaxed Patriots management into believing that it didn’t need to offer TB12 a contract extension, ostensibly because Belichick didn’t believe that Brady was the QB of the Patriots’ future, and also because he figured that Brady would take whatever low-market offer that the team would offer him, even though the QB had requested in previous contract negotiations that no franchise tag could get used at the end of his deal, and more importantly, Brady had sold his house in suburban Boston.
Brady left the Pats in March 2020, but the Patriots waited until July, when all of the good free-agent QBs were signed elsewhere, and then signed off the scrap heap 31-year-old Cam Newton, whose stats had deteriorated significantly in previous seasons, and who had played just two games the season before with the Panthers, and hadn’t played an NFL game since Sept. 2019. Predictably, the Patriots went 7-9 and missed the playoffs for the first time since 2008.
After that disappointing finish, Belichick convinced management to invest in offensive weapons for either a returning Newton or newly drafted Mac Jones. So the Patriots went hog-wild in free agency, signing coveted tight ends Hunter Henry (three years, $37.5M) and Jonnu Smith (four years, $50M) along with receivers Kendrick Bourne (three years, $15M) and Nelson Agholor (two years, $26M) — and then the team barely used the quartet, as all four receivers saw their target and catch numbers drop; Smith was particularly affected, as he went from 41 catches for 448 yards and eight TDs in 2020 to 28 catches for 294 yards and just one TD last season.
Meanwhile, Jones, who was anointed the starting QB during the 2021 training camp, had a solid rookie season, throwing 22 TDs with just seven interceptions, for 3,801 passing yards. Yet when he returned for his sophomore season, he found that his beloved OC, McDaniels, had bolted for the Vegas desert, and in his place was not an established play-caller, but a couple of recently fired head coaches whose expertise were on defense and special teams, respectively.
Even worse, to make it easy for the new coaches, a whole new offense was devised — during camp — and Jones was forced to learn a new offense on the fly in just his second season. Predictably, again, his stats have dropped: he has only thrown for 2310 yards this season, with just 13 TDs and eight interceptions (admittedly, he missed three games to injury).
When Jones has lost his cool on the field and on the sidelines this season, there apparently is no one on Belichick’s current staff to put him in his place and ignore Jones’s insolence and outbursts, and this behavior has not endeared him to Patriots fans or former players.
But this season is not necessarily Jones’s fault; it’s squarely on Belichick for not only hiring two buddies who came already paid for by their former teams, but whose staff is littered with coaches who have little or no experience, and what experience some of them brought to New England were in other facets of the game. For example, running backs coach Vinnie Sunseri played in the NFL, but as a safety, and the bulk of his career was on special teams; tight ends coach Nick Caley coached mainly on the defensive side of the ball at seven different schools, with a focus on the secondary; assistant offensive-line coach Billy Yates spent the 2018-19 season helping out on the defensive side of the ball under Matt Patricia in Detroit; and then there’s embattled special-teams coordinator Cameron Achord, who joined the Patriots after five seasons with that notorious gridiron hotbed, Southwest Mississippi Community College, where he served in roles as offensive coordinator, special-teams coordinator, quarterbacks, running backs and tight ends coach, as well as recruiting coordinator.
And don’t get me started on Belichick hiring his two sons to defensive coaching positions despite neither having any experience coaching the sport in college or the NFL.
Belichick, 70, has also taken some heat for his drafting and trading decisions, and he has no one to blame but himself because he is the de facto GM and has apparently hired loyal yes-men who will rarely question his decisions in team-building or coaching.
There are some decent coaches on this team, as evidenced by many of them being part of the 2018 championship squad, but what the team has done to Jones and the offense this season is nothing short of negligent and sabotaging in the growth of what had seemed to be a promising young QB just over a year ago. This team has some real talent on it, and there is absolutely no reason for it to be a below-.500 team with this roster. Therefore, one has to question the coaching.
Cleaning house and starting from scratch with a young head coach with insight and new ideas and letting him/her build the staff from the ground up (along with a separate GM) would be the first sign that the organization recognizes that it will never again reach the heights it did during the Belichick-Brady tenure, and if Brady is gone and the team continues to look as pathetic as it has at times this season, then it’s probably time for Belichick to go too.
A clean sweep would also remove a lot of the stench of cheating that has lingered over the team for years and years, and just bring a fresh start that would show the players in 2023 that the franchise is committed to improving and winning again, rather than misusing its assets and allowing an arrogant, rude, and unchallenged head coach to be the face of the organization.
So there is my argument for removing Bill Belichick and his cronies, sons, and in-over-their-heads yes-men; let Bill try to claim the remaining victories needed to pass Don Shula on the all-time NFL wins list somewhere else.