The New England Patriots clearly looked like a lesser version of themselves during the season, but a recent bombshell report by the Boston Herald’s Andrew Callahan and Karen Guregian suggests a much worse situation behind the scenes.
No, the walls of Gillette Stadium can’t talk, but the people walking the hallways can speak for them.
The Boston Herald pointed out that the sources in the story were kept anonymous due to “fear of retribution from the Patriots” for speaking out about coach Bill Belichick and the bedraggled mess of an offense he put on the field.
“It was disheveled,” one source told Callahan and Guregian. “They were always scrambling to get things done.”
Disheveled? Scrambling? Now, that doesn’t sound anything like a Belichick-coached football team.
It’s the Un-Patriot Way.
But it could also be seen coming a mile away, and fans didn’t need to walk the halls of Gillette Stadium to figure it out. People started questioning the state of the team the very moment Matt Patricia, the team’s former defensive coordinator, was named as the offensive play-caller. That’s when the oft-used “in Belichick we trust” phrase really started to lose its luster.
When met with hard questions from the media, Belichick would do the same bobbing and weaving he’s always done. The only difference this time was the team was sinking, and there was no late-season Tom Brady magic to save them.
Mac Jones was a second-year quarterback regressing under Belichick’s watch, the offensive line was a muddled mess, the receiving corps still lacked a true game-breaker and the unit as a whole just looked flat-out deflated and confused.
“A lot of guys were getting worried because when we were in the middle of camp, we were wondering what the plan was for our offense. Because we hadn’t put enough install in,” another source said, per the Boston Herald. “We had a couple protections, a couple core run plays, but our pass game didn’t have much in it.”
Not only were the Patriots limited in their offensive play-calling, but according to one of the sources, the coaching staff was unprepared for the defensive adjustments for those plays.
“A lot of guys would ask, ‘Well, what’s going to happen if [the defense] does this?’ And you would see they hadn’t really accounted for that yet,” a source told the Boston Herald. “And they’d say, ‘We’ll get to that when we get to that.’ That type of attitude got us in trouble.”
The Patriots finished with an 8-9 record and missed the playoffs for the second time in three seasons.
They have since hired Bill O’Brien as their new offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach in an attempt to fix the broken offense. But there is no real fix without accountability from Belichick.
His decision to make the necessary coaching changes on the offensive staff could be his way of doing exactly that.
