New England Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo answers questions during a news conference following an NFL football game in Foxborough, Mass., on Jan. 5.Steven Senne/The Associated Press
After his team spit the bit in a showcase game in London in October, rookie New England Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo said something he shouldn’t have – the truth.
“We’re a soft football team across the board,” Mayo told reporters in his postgame presser.
It’s getting harder and harder in pro sports to tell where the border between ‘Telling it like it is’ and ‘Kicking the boys when they’re down’ sits. It mostly depends on where sports Twitter has you geo-located that day.
As it turned out, Mayo had wandered over the front line. His former mentor, Bill Belichick, sneaked up behind and stuck him on a podcast: “I’m kind of hurt for those guys because to call them soft, they’re not soft.”
Mayo walked back his comments – one of the four horsemen of impending unemployment – saying he meant the team played soft, not were soft. Once you’re into tautologies, you’re finished.
The critical moment may have come when New England fans chanted ‘Fire Mayo’ in the midst of a blowout loss to the Chargers.
Or maybe it was Patriots linebacker Jahlani Tavai inadvertently knocking his coach into oncoming traffic by saying that those fans should “know their place.”
Whatever tipped it, the paperwork was signed and Cerloxed so that Mayo could be fired minutes after the Patriots’ season ended on Sunday.
The explanatory public note Patriots owner Robert Kraft released was most remarkable for its grovelling tone: “We have tremendous fans who expect and deserve a better product than we have delivered in recent years. I apologize for that.”
This is a team that, not so long ago, was considered not just the model for professional football, but for all of sport. It was the only one that had its own ‘way.’
Like New Zealand rugby and Barcelona soccer, the Patriots had transcended results and graduated into a system of being.
Now they’re the club that conspires to beat a Buffalo team that is absolutely begging to lose on the final day of the season, and in so doing gives back the No. 1 pick in this year’s draft. They’re the team getting a head coach who’s been groomed for leadership since he was still a player fired in under a year.
The Patriots aren’t just bad. They’re poisonous.
How did this happen? For the usual structural reasons – roster mismanagement, got upside-down on the cap, coaching turnover, tactical trends changed around them. But mostly it’s Tom Brady having a snit and doing what disaffected American culture workers do these days – move to Florida.
With the benefit of hindsight, a proposition: The New England Patriots were never a great team. They were a good team with the greatest quarterback of all time. Discuss.
What happens to any movement when its charismatic leader departs? At best, lassitude. At worst, collapse.
The Patriots tried to head off the former, and ended up with the latter. They stuck with Belichick, even though Brady’s absence had exposed him. They promoted a company man from within. They thought they’d identified the Brady 2.0 in Mac Jones. Jones is now a backup in Jacksonville.
Even amidst the wreckage, you’ll concede that the Patriots managed the transition away from Brady as responsibly as it could be done. Everything they did fit within the parameters of the same system that had resulted in massive success. But this time, its output was chaos.
In five years, they’ve gone from the best team in sport to the worst team in football.
This is a good thing.
It demonstrates that the games we watch are not logical. They aren’t even remotely sensible. If they seem that way, it’s only through hindsight.
Most success in sports is not the result of bold vision, but rather its opposite, cringing conservatism. The franchises people consider great right now – the Dodgers, the Chiefs, the Lightning – are most notable for their aversion to change.
If things could be planned, nine teams would not have passed on Patrick Mahomes in the 2017 draft. Since then, the team that took him would have a more ambitious long-term strategy than ‘Pray that nothing happens to QB1 because you don’t even want to know who QB2 is.’ Having lucked into a human-resources jackpot, Kansas City’s plan is to go with Mahomes until his wheels fall off, and then disintegrate. This is as inevitable as the ebbing of the tides.
It’s the reason nobody in the NHL ever trades a top player, even if they never win. Because their number came up once, and even though they’re bleeding chips, they can’t tear themselves away from that table.
Like William Goldman says about America’s other great entertainment touchstone, Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.”
Nobody in sports knows anything. Everyone’s guessing.
Someone guessed right on Brady. The result was two decades of domination. Next time, the guess wasn’t so great.
Now some of the same people who made that first, supremely correct guess – maybe the greatest guess in sports history – look like idiots.
In the end, there are no great organizations. There are only great circumstances. The Yankees are good every year not because they’re such a bunch of geniuses, but because they have a formula (pinstripe halo plus no salary cap plus biggest media market in the world plus unlimited resources). Anyone with a semi-decent line of patter could run the Yankees. And they still lose far more often than they win.
The people who do win, even consistently, do so because they’ve hit a gold seam – usually, one or two all-time players. Acquiring those players was either incredibly obvious or the result of blind luck. Once those players go, the smartest-man-in-the-game superlatives go with them.
In collapsing now, the New England Patriots are reaffirming sports’ cycle of life – you are born, you mature, you draft Tom Brady with the 199th pick and then you expire like everyone else.