The Patriots Also Name Bill O'Brien QBs Coach as We Get Details About What a Disaster Joe Judge Was
Well this explains a lot. If there is any lingering doubt as to whether the Patriots organization as a whole and Bill Belichick specifically recognize what a holocaust of wrong their offensive coaching staff was in 2022, we can dispel it right now. They've acknowledged it, and are correcting it way beyond just hiring a new coordinator.
Source - The New England Patriots announced that Bill O'Brien has been hired as offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach. O'Brien spent five seasons with the Patriots, from 2007 through the 2011 season, and contributed to five winning seasons, four AFC East Division titles and two AFC Conference Champions during his time with New England. The Patriots finished in the top 10 in offense every year during O'Brien's time with the Patriots.
"I am looking forward to working with Bill again," said Patriots head coach Bill Belichick. "He is an outstanding coach and an asset to our staff."
O'Brien served as offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach in 2011, following two seasons as quarterbacks coach (2009-10).
As if the mere act of officially giving O'Brien Joe Judge's old job in the middle of January didn't drive that point home, "several sources inside and around the organization" are spilling about just what a blood-splattered crime scene his season as quarterbacks coach was:
Source - [I]n 2022, the Patriots were dead on arrival.
They averaged 18.1 offensive points per game, and quarterback Mac Jones regressed despite having made, in Bill Belichick’s words, “dramatic improvement” over the previous offseason.
In the words of other Patriots, the offense was worse than numbers could capture. It was broken. Dysfunctional. Riddled with distrust. …
Seeds of dysfunction were planted in the spring and summer, around the time Jones told the media he would teach his new quarterbacks coach, Joe Judge, the first of multiple comments he made that would irk higher-ups. Months later, members of the organization sensed Belichick’s offensive staff suffered from the same lack of cohesion players would display on Sundays. Soon enough, they knew they were right.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” one source said.
“It was disheveled,” another source said. “They were always scrambling to get things done.” …
“It’s always been about winning and doing what’s best for the team. I really believe (Belichick) when he says that,” one source said. “I just think he really didn’t understand how hard it was going to be.”
Or, in the words of another source: “I love coach (Belichick), but he f—ed us.”
Let's pause this for a second while I project my own feelings into this. His fuck up was trusting Matt Patricia and Judge.
Next comes a discussion of the dysfunctional offense, which I was writing about as far back as August when I said, among thousands of other words:
Sacks, runs to nowhere, incompletions, bubble screens to your slot guy, passes to your 3rd down back in the flat. That's the description of what you run with a fifth round rookie under center playing with the guys who won't make the roster. Something to just get his feet under him and get him used to game conditions. And not the way you build a professional offense around second year Pro Bowler you've surrounded with expensive free agent targets.
The sources The Herald spoke to expanded on that. The article continues:
The base offense the Patriots drilled last spring and summer barely resembled the system Belichick had overseen for 23 years. Under Patricia and Judge, the Pats began to meld a reduced version of the playbook former offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels left behind with parts of Sean McVay’s Rams scheme. …
The results were disastrous. …
One source described a typical training camp practice under McDaniels involving the installation of 25 pages worth of fresh run plays, another 25 of passing plays and upwards of 40 pages for the offensive line learning protection schemes.
Under Patricia and Judge? Those numbers were cut by roughly half.
“A lot of guys were getting worried because when we were in the middle of camp, we were wondering what the plan was for our offense. Because we hadn’t put enough install in,” a source said. “We had a couple protections, a couple core run plays, but our pass game didn’t have much in it.”
The results were, that instead of simplifying things, which was the stated goal, they did the opposite. Like when you try to help your 5th grader with his math homework and realize they've only made everything more complicated since you were in school. We continue:
“A lot of guys would ask, ‘Well, what’s going to happen if (the defense) does this?’ And you would see they hadn’t really accounted for that yet,” one source said. “And they’d say, ‘We’ll get to that when we get to that.’ That type of attitude got us in trouble.”
Eventually, the staff’s approach ran counter to the reason they had pivoted in the first place.
“By the end, they were just making 1,000 adjustments instead of building them in at the beginning,” one source said.
Remember how Mac Jones has publicly stated he's a guy who likes to ask "Why?" Who wants to know the whole thought process behind a gameplan, or even a call? And how some took that to mean he's just being difficult or petulant, when to my way of thinking it's just him thinking like a coach, which you want in a guy making major decisions on the field? This sheds even more light on his struggles this past year:
Around early October, when Jones was sidelined by a high ankle sprain, players began to see less of his position coach in meetings.
Joe Judge, they later suspected, was in a long process of being phased out. It was a stark change from training camp when Judge would command meetings and share the play-call sheet in team periods with Patricia and Belichick. Judge also coached across positions in practice, forcing other assistants to occasionally correct his talking points to players during drills. …
Belichick would blast him in practice, and it wasn’t uncommon for Judge and Jones to trade profanity-laced outbursts. Jones’ trust in his position coach was effectively non-existent.
“Mac didn’t like him,” one source said. “At all.”
“(Judge) would speak extra loudly in meetings, trying to project like he was the guy,” another source said. “And I think that kind of rubbed people the wrong way.”
“A lot of people were frustrated with (Judge),” a third added.
The piece goes on and on like that. I've already included probably far more than I should, so instead I'll just urge you to read it for yourself, because it's gets far more granular than the bits I've excerpted. Failed concepts. Ill-considered protection schemes. Coaches trying to coach without the one essential ingredient they all need in order to function: The confidence of the coached. It's all there.
I'm sure there'll be a lot of discussion this winter about who talked to The Herald. And while it's an interesting question, it doesn't concern me. There are veterans who are leaving and some who will probably be retiring, and are therefore free to talk without fear of retribution. What's far more relevant is that everyone in the organization seems to be of one mind about the catastrophe we just witnessed.
The problem wasn't Mac Jones. It wasn't his arm strength or him seeing ghosts or the old argument they always threw at Tom Brady that "he doesn't like to get hit." (As if a quarterback is supposed to enjoy that like some submissive and enjoy the 3rd & 22s that come from getting sacked.) It wasn't a lack of talent outside the numbers. It wasn't even the offensive line, which we all expected to be one of the strongest units on this team. None of those groups are without blame. They all underachieved. But more than any other sport, football begins and ends with coaching. It's essential. Like the Ancient Roman philosophy that an army of donkeys led by a lion will defeat an army of lions led by a donkey. Now hopefully the 2023 Patriots offense will be lions led by a bigger, older, wiser lion.
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It's no wonder Mac Jones is feeling so good about the future. We all should.