Mac Jones doesn’t want to relive 2022. That much is obvious, with every question deflected.
But hints of the rubble left behind are there with the Patriots’ quarterback.
“I mean, for me, it’s just about moving on,” Jones said a couple of hours after the team’s final practice in Foxborough last week, before players left for joint practices in Green Bay. “I think everyone would agree. I don’t really care about the emotion behind it all. It’s about, How do you have a fresh start? How do you move forward? This happens every year. Every player knows there are things that happen in the past years that you wish you had back.
“But at the end of the day, if you’re fortunate, you get to play the next year. That’s where I’m at, and I’m excited to go to work in coach [Bill] O’Brien’s offense.”
His excitement was punctuated, on the day I visited the fields behind Gillette Stadium, simply by the time I saw Jones put in. He was the first player to make the walk up the hill and onto the lower practice grounds in Foxborough before a midday session. And after the practice, which stretched over two hours, Jones, the other quarterbacks and the receivers spent an extra half hour or so getting extra work in.
Maybe part of it’s that, for the first time in a while, Jones has something to rebound from.
In the three years before last season, his football trajectory had the velocity of a rocket ship: Over that time, Jones went from not knowing whether he’d play a meaningful snap at Alabama in the summer of 2019 to contending for NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year into January ’22. In between, he flashed as an injury replacement for Tua Tagovailoa, had a near-perfect final season in college, one that culminated in a national title, then was drafted in the first round, beat out Cam Newton for a starting spot and piloted a playoff team in his first pro season.
Benny Sieu/USA TODAY Sports
Last year, that rocket ship crashed. Josh McDaniels left for Vegas. He was replaced with an experiment, with Bill Belichick installing a defensive coach by trade (Matt Patricia) as Jones’s coordinator and one with a mostly special teams background (Joe Judge) as his position coach. Jones’s completion percentage, yardage, TD-to-INT ratio and passer rating plummeted, and the coaches had him fighting for his job against rookie Bailey Zappe.
If you want to know how the quarterback digested all that, just look back at the above answer to a question posed on whether he harbored hard feelings from 2022, and you’ll get your hints of the rubble—in how he referenced the emotions and things he’d want to take back.
If you look at the last four years as a mosaic, Jones has surely seen a lot. He has had a unique time bridging the college-to-pro gap, with what the two seasons on both sides of the draft have held. And he thinks now, looking at the totality of it, there’s a lot he personally will be able to take from it.
“I love that,” Jones says of what he hopes to gain from it. “You gotta look at the full picture. Obviously just trying to build on all those experiences, good and bad. Some people may not realize, but you go through a lot as a player, especially playing at Alabama and here. There’s a lot of ups and downs. You got to keep moving forward. It’s all about persistence and really just taking your path, trying not to ride the wave of everything.
“There’s going to be ups. There’s going to be downs. Hopefully with persistence, you weather the storm. I feel like that’s kind of what I’ve learned. Everything comes and goes. You have good days, bad days. It’s if you can try and weather that storm. That’ll continue. I’m sure there will be a lot of good stuff and then a lot of stuff that needs to get cleaned up, and we’ll go from there.”
To me, Jones is one of the more interesting figures in the league going into September, just in that his unique path, bumps and all, has made it so most people aren’t quite sure what to make of his future. Which is why he and I covered a lot of ground in our conversation. There were several conclusions I came to.
1) The football marriage with O’Brien has been a good one thus far. The Patriots’ new (and old) offensive coordinator arrived at Alabama in 2021 (as Jones was prepping for the draft), and, through their brief interactions, Jones actually helped show O’Brien a few things about the Tide offense. This spring, obviously, those roles were reversed, and the two spent a lot of time together.
More or less, Belichick assigned O’Brien to work with Jones, who was in the building early and often through April, May and June.
“We got a lot of things done early on in OTAs, and I think we built a good library,” Jones says. “Nothing was ever perfect and nothing will be perfect. We definitely are on the same page, and we’re building that trust. That’s one thing that’s big between the quarterback and the coordinator, regardless of who it is: He has to trust you, and then you have to be able to trust him. I think all that stuff really plays into building it early on in OTAs.
“That carries on to the season. You don’t really know when it’s going to be really hard or when it’s going to be really good. You can’t control that. It’s going to go up and down.”
And the good news, as Jones sees it, is that the trust needed to get through all that has already been established, mostly because of how he sees O’Brien as a coach.
“He’s super real,” Jones continues. “He’s a straight-up guy, not only as a coach but as a person. He’s going to let you know, Hey, you’re not doing this right. Hey, you’re doing this really well. Some coaches will tell you, but then they don’t give you a plan to fix it. I think the coolest part is he gives you the plan, and then from there, you got to go out and execute it. Something might pop up in OTAs where I did something wrong. He’s like, Well, do this throw instead of that throw. Next thing you know, it comes up today at practice.
“It’s just little things like that. … I think the unit, most importantly, feels the same way as I do in that we have a lot of trust in him to work things out throughout the season.”
2) The Alabama background O’Brien brings with him is going to matter. And, to me, it even showed up early in the Patriots’ preseason game Saturday night, on a second-and-11. Jones put the ball in Rhamondre Stevenson’s belly, pulled it and quickly unloaded it to Kendrick Bourne on a slant as he took a hit from the Packers’ Colby Wooden. It was the type of RPO that Jones feasted on at Alabama, and something O’Brien had in his bag.
It’s been easy for the coach and coordinator to translate those sorts of concepts to the pros for obvious reasons.
“Yeah, for sure, there was a lot of crossover,” Jones says. “We speak the same language. He used to coach for Belichick and [Nick] Saban, and I played for Belichick and Saban. We understand that it’s a tough place to play. In practice, everything’s going to be hard. You’ve got defensive head coaches, so they’re trying to make it hard on you. We love the challenge. We speak the same terminology. Sometimes I’ll bring up an old play, and everyone’s like, What’s that? And O’B’s like, It’s this. We’re talking the same language. It’s fun.
Eric Canha/USA TODAY Sports
“He’s learned a lot, which is cool for me to see in just talking to him. You learn so much going from college to pros back to college to pros. He’s kind of picked up a little bit each way. I learned that about my coaches at Alabama. A lot of guys take what they learned at Alabama and take it to their next stop or vice versa. It’s cool to see that for sure.”
3) As a result, the offense is going to have Patriots hallmarks, but it won’t be strictly going back to what McDaniels ran as OC in 2021. Jones, of course, had a lot of success under the now Raiders coach. But the thing is, the quarterback had a lot of success playing for Steve Sarkisian and Saban in Tuscaloosa, too—so what O’Brien is cooking up for Jones won’t be from only the New England lineage that the coordinator came up in.
“I’d say it’s a nice melting pot,” Jones says. “It all depends on the game. You go into one game, and it might be something. You change it up in the next game. That’s how we’ve always been here. For me, it’s staying within the system because the system is really good. It’s a proven system. As a quarterback, it puts a lot on your plate, but that’s what I love. I have control over everything. You kind of call the shots along with the offensive coordinator.
“That makes it a lot of fun."
(Which is one hint that some things will be as they were under McDaniels—who puts a lot, in the way of checks, protection calls and route adjustments, on his quarterbacks.)
4) Jones sees himself as the starter. That might read a little weirdly. But Belichick, for his part, never really affirmed Jones was his starter again, even as he rolled him out there every week last year (after benching Jones against Chicago for Zappe in Week 7, when the second-year QB was coming back from a high ankle sprain). Since then, Belichick has held his ground on that noncommittal stance of who will start at quarterback, all the way through this spring and summer.
But in camp, based on who’s running with the first team, there’s been little question about who is the lead dog. And Jones has no problem saying he expects, and has expected, to be the starter.
“There’s always the cliché of you always have to prepare like you’re the starter. I feel like I’m not trying to focus on that stuff and really get ready for the future and what we’re about to go up against,” Jones says. “Having played two years, I have some experience, but I have a lot to learn. Really, for me, it’s about getting ready to play in football games and win football games and show the team that we can win with me at quarterback.
“I’m definitely excited, but, like I always say, you have to be ready for the good. You have to be ready for the bad. Going out there and competing is all you can do, and then responding to mistakes positively is something I’m going to put a lot of pride into, just trying to get back to the way I played in college.”
It was interesting that Jones made that last comment—that he wants to get back to how he played in college—because he had another one, earlier in our conversation, that mirrored it, when I asked whether he thought there was a benefit to getting knocked down a peg last year.
“Of course,” he answered. “It’s super motivating if you funnel it in the right way. Nobody was happy with that, especially me. I feel like I could have done a lot of things better. Like I said with Coach O’Brien, I’m just identifying those areas on the field, off the field, whatever it is, to try and just become a full player and franchise quarterback. That comes from working every day from top to bottom and just trying to put my best foot forward, and having fun while doing it.
“I think that’s a big thing for me, keeping it loose and going out there and slinging it. Going back to the Alabama Mac.”
And who, I then asked, is the Alabama Mac?
“When I’m in the right headspace and I can go out there and let it fly and not think too much and go play football,” he says. “That’s what it’s all about for me, play football with my teammates and enjoy one another. We’re out there grinding every day together, so when somebody makes a good play, somebody go spike that thing. It should be fun. You have to go out there and enjoy it. There’s going to be tough times, too. You have to understand, How do we bounce back? How do we play the next play as a unit? That starts with the quarterback.
“Obviously, we’re trying to start that now.”
I then brought up how, at times, in those spots, his emotion has boiled over, and mentioned the John McEnroe nickname he earned at Alabama—a nod, from Saban, to Jones’s tendency to run hot, while doubling as a reference to the quarterback’s tennis background. Jones laughed.
“McEnroe was a pretty good tennis player,” he says. “Hopefully I can do something like he did, but on the football field.”
That’d show, at the very least, all that happened last year wasn’t for naught.
