This Patriots Issue Clearly Stuck With Jerod Mayo After Jets Loss

The Patriots didn't do much of anything right in Thursday's loss to the New York Jets.

New England's biggest issue was apparent, however, as they put together their worst tackling display since 2020.

Pro Football Focus charted the usually sure-handed defense as having missed 14 total tackles on the evening. Alex Austin had a particularly ugly effort on the game's opening touchdown, which he'll never live down. Kyle Dugger and Marcus Jones followed up solid starts to the year with dreadful whiffs. Raekwon McMillan and Jahlani Tavai were letting rushers bounce off them left and right while filling in for Ja'Whaun Bentley.

How bad was it? Jerod Mayo couldn't stop talking about it postgame.

"It was very uncharacteristic," Mayo said immediately after the game, per team-provided transcript. "It's one of the things I'm very disappointed in as a defensive minded head coach -- especially the second level."

Mayo was asked about the defensive effort again Friday, providing a similar explanation to that of Patriots defensive coordinator DeMarcus Covington.

"The biggest issue, in my opinion, was tackling," Mayo said. "We couldn't tackle. We didn't tackle. We haven't really had that problem up until this point, so we have to get that corrected... It just came down to tackling the ball carriers, controlling the line of scrimmage, things that we've done up until this point, and we’ve just got to get better. It's always tough when you lose a guy like Bentley, but I do feel like we have players that can step up and fill those roles."

Covington was so annoyed with the effort that he used a variation of the word "tackle" a total of 11 times in his presser.

"It was missed tackles, the things that we didn't do well to keep them on the field," Covington said. "It's not really what they did, it's what we didn't do to get them off the field -- whether it was a penalty, whether it was the missed tackles or whether it was a misalignment... It wasn't anything where it was X's and O's. It was really about catching, blocking, defeating blocks, tackling. That's what it came down to, really."

The Patriots didn't tackle well, and it really stuck with Mayo and Covington, but those are the guys who need to make sure any issues start to get fixed. It starts at the top.