Patriots Preseason Narrative Dies With Jerod Mayo’s ‘Soft’ Declaration

Patriots coach Jerod Mayo is looking and sounding more presidential by the day … and that’s not a good thing.

There’s this thing about presidents of the United States and how four years in the Oval Office seems to speed up the aging process. A lot of them go in with something resembling youthful exuberance and come out looking like they’ve got one foot in the grave. The stress of such a job can do that to a man.

Mayo seems to be aging in fast forward, too. On Sunday, as he stood at a podium in London and declared his 1-6 football team “soft” (insert hot dog meme here), looked like a broken man — a far cry from the young whippersnapper who sat at the dais at Gillette Stadium in January to start the next era in New England football. The presidential similarities don’t end there. Mayo is also having trouble keeping those campaign trail promises.

No one really expected the Patriots to be good in 2024. Surely, though, they should have been better than this. At the very least, the hope was Mayo could build something. He certainly spoke like someone who was ready to make their own mark. Mayo was going to take the Patriots out of the dark days of Bill Belichick, improve the vibes and put a smile on everyone’s faces as he set the course for the next dynasty.

The Kumbaya Patriots were off and running.

“I’m a huge believer in having a shared vision where the players have stock, the players do take accountability,” Mayo told The Athletic in a story that ran in late May. “So when things get bumpy — and they will get bumpy — they understand they were part of the vision when everything is good. … Everyone is happy, running around, and the vibe of the building is different.”

Anecdotes about a new mural in the building and a basketball hoop in the locker room at the time were meant to further illustrate that new vibe. Now, that idea has aged like milk. The obvious second-guess is whether Mayo’s player empowerment strategy has, well, made the Patriots soft.

It’s hard not to draw something resembling a straight line connecting Mayo’s supposed vision to a team of players that hasn’t been held to the accountability the coach mentioned. It started in training camp with an uncomfortably public spat with since-traded defensive star Matthew Judon. Players were given the green light to speak their minds, and that led to on-the-record contract squawking. Since the games have started counting, players aren’t exactly keeping quiet about frustrations with roles or game plans. Go ahead and mix in some off-field legal issues.

All the while, the team stinks at professional football. Sunday’s loss to the lowly Jaguars dropped New England to 1-6 with a league-worst minus-76 point differential. The Patriots were supposed to be building to something; instead, they’re backsliding.

There are a lot of examples of Belichick disciples falling on their faces out on their own because they tried to hard to be their mentor. Mayo, meanwhile, went out of his way to show and tell us all he wasn’t Belichick. Things were going to be different at One Patriot Place. The early results, as Mayo himself noted Sunday in London, have been disastrous.

The Patriots, in course correcting from the big, bad Belichick (who did have to go, given the way he was trending), probably overdid it.

Patriots owner Robert Kraft bought in, though.

“I really believe he’s created an atmosphere where the dialogue and communication with the players, they’re going to to go out and play for him,” Kraft told ESPN. “I want to see that effort and players putting out.”

That worked for a week or two. Since then, the collective grip on the rope looks — from the outside — as it’s getting looser. For a team trying to build a foundation and a new identity, that’s alarming, to say the least.

“We talked about it at the beginning of the season — what success looks like for me — and that’s getting better each and every week,” Mayo told ESPN last month. “Not only the players, but also the coaches and myself.”

So far, it has been anything but that, and if Mayo can’t find a way to pivot on the fly, his stint as the head coach might be short-lived.