The first difference in the new head coach’s office is obvious. In fact, for any player passing by on the ground floor of Gillette Stadium, it’s impossible to miss.
Jerod Mayo’s desk is right by the door to his office. When Bill Belichick was New England’s coach, the desk used to be around the corner and invisible to passersby. But Mayo moved the desk so it was planted square to the entrance. Now whoever comes in, or even meanders past, immediately sees the new guy in charge.
“It used to be over here, so you’d never know if [the coach] was in or not,” says Mayo, pointing to his left, at a table and some chairs that were moved in the process. “I put my desk here, and I leave my door open. When guys walk by to leave work, they see me in here. They can walk in. I want that type of relationship. I want that type of communication.”
It’s just one of many cosmetic changes to the Patriots’ facilities over the past seven months, since Mayo, 38, became the second-youngest coach in the NFL. (The Seahawks’ Mike Macdonald has Mayo beat by 16 months.)
Not a single one of the changes was accidental, though Mayo’s first offseason as a head coach has required a balancing act that lacks precedent. He played all of eight of his NFL seasons as linebacker under Belichick from 2008 to ’15, and worked on his staff starting in 2019. He believes in so much of what the coach who won six Super Bowls with the franchise had taught and built. Yet Mayo knows that a copy-paste of the Belichick program won’t work. He wants to honor the team’s past but realizes some renovation is needed on a football operation that went 29–38 the past four years, including a 4–13 crash and burn last season.
And so, yes, he’s made lots of changes to the look of the facility. There’s a mural on a nearby wall, painted by a local artist, that has Mayo putting his arm around a kid in shoulder pads, a reminder that no one makes it alone. There’s a basketball hoop in the building now, an intentional upgrade from, and nod to, when Mayo and his teammates created “Trashketball,” shooting crumpled-up paper into cans with makeshift backboards in the locker room. There’s a new players lounge, too, with more games.
But if you’re looking for something truly indicative of the tightrope Mayo’s walking, it’s in that hallway outside the office. As you enter the building and pass by the coach’s quarters, to the right are displays celebrating the accomplishments of the franchise, decade by decade, with the 24-season Belichick Era figuring prominently. But to the left are new painted slogans—progress … process … payoff and hard work works—with red stars affixed above them all the way to the right, positioned like asterisks.
Those red stars—more on these later—are another marking of the arrival of a new era. The idea behind them wouldn’t be foreign to Belichick. But Mayo’s packaging of it is very, very different.
Displayed prominently in Mayo’s office are framed pictures of the coach and his wife, Chantel, and of their four children. It’s not unlike what you might see in any other coach’s office, but there’s a purpose to that placement. It shows his players and fellow coaches that the new boss wants them to have balanced lives. And that’s about more than wanting them to be happy. It’s also about having them focused.
“If home is happy, then you’ll come to work happy,” he says. “If your wife just cussed you out the night before, you’re sleeping butt-to-butt the night before, it’s going to be hard to talk Cover 2 or West Coast concepts in here at 7 a.m.”
As such, Mayo invited players and coaches to bring their families to spring practices. He told them if their kids have a game or recital, they should go see it if they have the time, even in-season. He asked team chaplain Jua Robinson to set up a program to help players with parenting skills. And players know that when work is done, it’s all right to go home. Conversely, if the players do want to hang around the facility, between the basketball hoop and lounge, they have incentives to stay.
“He’s letting us know that this is our home,” fifth-year safety Kyle Dugger says. “We spend a lot of time here, [so] feeling like you’re going into work, but also feeling like it’s a second home, is a big deal.”
Because just as the bonds of family are important, the bonds between teammates are, too. This year’s team will be integrating a rookie QB in No. 3 pick Drake Maye, part of the process of turning over a 2023 roster that delivered the franchise’s fewest wins in 31 seasons. Mayo, who captained seven teams during the Patriots’ glory years, has a pretty good insight into how winning teams build chemistry, and yes, he has an illustration in his office to show that, too.
Off to his right, there hangs a massive print of Mayo huddling together with his teammates before a game in 2011, with maybe 30 or 40 guys crowded around him. (He has a duplicate of the image at home.) No player misses it walking into that office. Mayo in recent years had noticed the numbers in those types of pregame gatherings had been dwindling. Some weeks there’d be 15, others there’d be 10, clustered around a captain. He wants the old spirit back.
“Look at who’s in the picture,” Mayo says. “You got Logan Mankins on the outside. You’ve got [Wes] Welker right here. You got Devin McCourty. You have Kevin Faulk. It says, It doesn’t matter. When we step across the white lines, it’s us. During training camp, it’s offense versus defense. Once we get to this point right here, it’s us. You got [Matthew] Slater, [Brandon] Spikes. There are some good players in that circle. I think those things are important.”
It’s also another mark of his stamp on the place, which is where those little red stars he put by the slogans—and everywhere else—come back in. Since childhood, Mayo has hated the dumb-jock stigma and always challenged himself, talented as he was as a player, to be more than an athlete. He knew that as his playing career wound down, he would probably pursue coaching. In fact, over his final three injury-riddled years, as he rehabbed, he and Belichick’s eldest son, Steve, bonded as they learned football from each other, watching tape together in a dark office dubbed “the dungeon.”
It was an early sign Mayo might eventually land in this seat. But first he had that itch to scratch, to show what he could do away from football. Working as an executive-in-residence, he dove into the world of healthcare finance at Optum. During that time he read avidly about business, and one day he came across a story about the CEO of Southwest Airlines, who’d used the term “North Star” as a device to keep his employees focused on the company’s overall vision.
Of course, Mayo’s goal is not to be the lowest-cost provider of air transportation. He has his own North Star.
On this late July morning, when asked whether he’d talked to his mentor since replacing him, Mayo quickly answered, “I have not.”
“That’s a tough one for me,” he says, pausing for a minute. “I have nothing but love and respect for him. He’s helped me become the person and the man that I am today. Steve [now defensive coordinator at the University of Washington] and I still talk. [Belichick’s younger son] Brian is on staff [as secondary coach]. …”
Belichick was the first to invite Mayo to coach, as he was mulling retirement from playing. Belichick was also the guy on the other end of the phone offering Mayo a spot on his staff in 2019, as Mayo was on vacation with his family in the Bahamas. And the one who strapped a jetpack to Mayo’s development, letting him call defensive plays in practice just a couple of months after he was hired as linebackers coach.
But Belichick didn’t leave Foxborough on his own terms. He wanted to keep coaching and wasn’t afforded the chance. So the idea he’d be back in the building helping his successor so soon after was never realistic.
Traces of Belichick have endured, nonetheless.
“Look, there were a lot of things, obviously, that Bill did really well in a lot of different areas and ways,” says center David Andrews, who has been with the franchise since 2015. “I don’t think you take that and look at it and throw it all out the window. Because there are just some truths in football that are always truths. Whether it’s fundamentals, techniques, there’s just truths.”
Clearly, many of Belichick’s truths remain. Mayo’s focus on those fundamentals will carry over into a plan to be a walk-around head coach who oversees the entire team, while letting his assistants, to borrow a phrase, do their jobs.
In explaining what he’s trying to build, Mayo describes a team that could run the ball 40 times one Sunday, throw it 40 times the next, doing whatever it takes to win, while showing itself to be “a tough, smart, dependable team.” Apprised that the description sounds familiar, he smiled.
“It is, right?” Mayo says. “I’m not going to s--- on Bill. That’s the way to win.”
On the flip side, he’s looked to other leaders for lessons as well. Steelers coach and fellow Hampton, Va., native Mike Tomlin has been a sounding board and drilled Mayo on the importance of being ready for anything as a new head coach. Tony Dungy was a resource, too—the old Colts coach joked that he never thought he’d be welcome at Gillette upon visiting in the spring—and worked with Mayo on the challenges of team construction. Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell, Mayo’s 2008 draft classmate on the Patriots, has given him a peer to confide in.
The North Star example is just one idea Mayo has drawn from outside football. Another concept he has borrowed from the business world is the “flat” structure he and executive VP of player personnel Eliot Wolf have put in place to promote open communication and allow for ideas to flow while empowering their scouting directors and coaches.
“It’s our team,” Mayo says. “It’s not my team. It’s not Eliot’s team. It’s our team. It’s the guys’. It’s ownership’s team. It’s our team. Who’s making decisions? That’s a different question, but I would say it’s our team and that’s how we’re going to approach it.”
Of course, this isn’t the way Mayo’s ascension was supposed to play out. In an ideal world, he would have taken over only after Belichick had claimed the NFL’s all-time wins record, rather than stepping in to clean up and start a rebuild. So Mayo has had to learn as he goes, keeping some things, overhauling others. He’s doing it in the hopes of building a Belichick-type engine, but having it run under a very different body type.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as How Jerod Mayo Is Striking a Balance Between the Past and the Future.
