There was a time, not long ago, when it would have been piling on to suggest the 2024 Patriots seemed headed for a 1-16 season. But now? After Sunday’s 32-16 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars at Wembley Stadium in London, and after Pats coach Jerod Mayo walked into the interview room and made the stunning acknowledgment that “we’re a soft football team across the board,” the question now is: How could they not finish 1-16?
Both the Patriots and Jaguars came into Sunday with bookend 1-5 records. That made this a so-called “winnable” game for both teams, except only the Jaguars seemed to grasp the meaning of that word. So breezily and giddily did the Jaguars run the ball that by the end of the day they had outmuscled the soft (© Jerod Mayo 2024) Patriots in ground yards 171-38.
The Pats committed their usual array of head-scratching penalties.
The Jags’ Parker Washington returned a punt 96 yards, stagily falling backward into the end zone for a touchdown and with nary a New England fingerprint on his clothing.
Rookie quarterback Drake Maye was impressive in the early going, such as when he connected with JaMycal Hasty for a 16-yard touchdown on the opening drive, helping New England to a 7-0 lead, and he wound up 26-for-37 for 276 yards and two touchdowns. But it would be a reach to state he was a standout in a losing cause. At least the Patriots don’t have “a quarterback problem.” They have their guy. What they also have is an “everything else problem.”
A bit Hasty! @Patriots score on their opening drive.
📺: #NEvsJAX on NFL Network
📱: Stream on #NFLPlus pic.twitter.com/EwA4kDhIoK— NFL (@NFL) October 20, 2024
So let’s return for a moment to those 1-15 Patriots from 1990. To go by the math, and only the math, they’re atop the leaderboard as Worst Patriots Team in History. And I guess if the 2024 Patriots kept losing and wound up at 1-16, they’d move into the top spot, 1-16 being one more loss than 1-15. So there.
But hold on. Some context is required here. The 1990 Pats were not in a rebuild. They were destined for a teardown, which is different. They didn’t have a take-us-to-the-Super Bowl quarterback in the making. (Sorry, Tommy Hodson). They didn’t have star players. They had a coach, the late Rod Rust, a terrific guy who, alas, was a 62-year-old career assistant who served more or less as a stopgap. When the locker room fell apart, largely because of an ugly sexual harassment incident involving a female sportswriter, Rust was powerless to put it all back together.
But despite the famous Bill Parcells view that “you are what your record says you are,” some harsh truths need to laid out about these 2024 Patriots. And here’s the harshest truth of all: This will likely be remembered as the worst edition of the Pats since the NFL/AFL merger, even worse than what happened in 1990, regardless of record.
Whether New England winds up going 1-16, or 2-15, or 3-14, or even if this collection of softies (© Jerod Mayo 2024) rises to the occasion in the form of matching the 4-13 campaign of 2023 that led to for-sure future Hall of Fame coach Bill Belichick being fired by possibly-but-who-knows future Hall of Fame owner Robert Kraft, it’s still going to be the lowest of the low.
I know what some of you old-timers are saying: Nothing can beat the 1990 Patriots for lousiness. You lived it. And again, you have the math sitting there in your super-fan utility belt. It’s just that nobody even cared about the 1990 Patriots. They drew 26,280 fans to Foxboro Stadium for a 34-14 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs, and only 22,286 turned out for a 25-10 loss to Washington. Foxboro Stadium was packed for the season finale, but that’s only because their opponents that day were the New York Giants, whose fans bought up every ticket at Foxboro Stadium and then turned the trip home on Interstate 95 into a 207-mile pre-Super Bowl rolling rally after the Jints’ 13-10 victory.
Nobody expected the 2024 Patriots to win a lot of games. What most people did expect was renewed energy. They expected the new coach, Mayo, a former player, to change the vibe, the attitude, the atmosphere, around Gillette Stadium. The 2024 Pats were supposed to be the team that grinds out the extra yard, that reaches a little higher, that does daring things (such as Maye going deep more often), because that’s how underdog teams steal victories.
Drake to KJ, a thing of beauty.@KJ_Osborn | @DrakeMaye2
📺: NFLN pic.twitter.com/NyRUx8TPgJ
— New England Patriots (@Patriots) October 20, 2024
And considering it was apparently several years ago that Kraft ticketed Mayo to be the coach-in-waiting, there was plenty of optimism when the move was made. Maybe Kraft had “seen something” in Mayo. It was Papa Kraft, after all, who did the maneuvering in 2000 to wrest Belichick from the New York Jets to be his next head coach. The move was mocked at the time, especially in New York. Might Kraft be right again?
He still might be. And this is the part where it’s important to point out that a rebuild is a rebuild, and that things happen. Plus, the Pats are without defensive tackle Christian Barmore (blood clots), linebacker Ja’Whaun Bentley (torn pec) and safety Jabrill Peppers (domestic violence allegations) for those who wish to fly that flag. But, and this is something Amos Alonzo Stagg was probably saying a hundred years ago, injuries happen in football. Besides, injuries aren’t supposed to make the healthy players “soft,” which is now an official declaration right out of the Mayo playbook.
It’s scary when the head coach says that.
What’s even scarier is when the players sign off on it.
“He said it well,” veteran linebacker Jahlani Tavai said. “We gotta look in the mirror and we have to understand what he’s saying and ask if we’re OK being soft. Some people will fall off and the rest of us who want to prove that wrong will step up and make sure that this doesn’t happen.”
On the 2024 Patriots, that’s an optimistic outlook.
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(Photo of Parker Washington on his way to a touchdown: Richard Heathcote / Getty Images)
