Belichick Rips Jerod Mayo for Ripping His 'Soft' Team. So it's War.
Let me know if this sounds familiar. An iconic public figure seems months away from the culmination of a celebrated, decades-long career. While many have begun to question whether he still has the sound judgment he built his reputation on. Still others ask whether he's simply grown too old and too set in his ways for such a demanding job. When suddenly, after years of struggles and missteps, he finds himself removed. Publicly lauded for all he's achieved and given an honorable farewell. But stripped of power nevertheless. Replaced with someone he chose to be his assistant in 2019. And in the background to all this, there are credible reports of lingering resentment between the old regime and the new. Making it difficult for those who continue to work for the organization. Undermining their efforts to make the new leader a winner. And things just seem to keep getting worse.
Of course we could only be talking about the 2024 New England Patriots. Whose former Commander-in-Chief finds himself free to speak his mind. And doesn't much care for his former subordinate running down the empire he built:
Shots fired!
After 24 years of telling his players, "Ignore the Noise," Belichick is not about to ignore this noise for one hot second. You can just hear the pride in his voice here. His defense last year did, in fact, lead the NFL in stopping the run, with a mere 3.3 YPA. Even though they were carrying the worst offense in football on their back. This year, they're 21st, with 4.6 YPA. Worse still, they've given up an average of 167.7 yards per game over the past five weeks.
This despite having largely the same cast of characters. Including all the guys he drafted and developed who got extensions this offseason that he mentions, Anfernee Jennings, Jahlani Tavai and Kyle Dugger. He points out they've got Marcus Jones and Christian Gonzalez, who were on IR by this time last year. Plus Deatrich Wise, Davon Godchaux, Keion White, Marte Mapu, Jonathan Jones. Josh Uche. The fact Belichick chose to single these players of his out by name and assure everyone "These are tough guys. … They'll strap it up and go," seems like both a defense of them and a slap at their current coach. There's simply no other way to interpret it.
And this is a sentiment he doubled down on Monday night. As a side note, remember when he and Tom Brady reportedly couldn't stand to be sharing the same planet with each other? Now they spend more time on camera together than the harpies on The View.
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"I think when you criticize your publicly like that, it doesn't always go well. … Ultimately I always felt like when the team played bad, that was my responsibility. We might have had bad playing, but we had bad coaching that led to bad playing. So I think it's always best to take a look at yourself and do what you can do to help the team. And if you have constructive criticism as a coach, that's your job."
This said before he reminded everyone again that he had coached these same players to be the best run defense in football. So the only conclusion a reasonably functioning brain can come to is that Belichick thinks the problem with his former team is the coaching.
But I think it's fair to read more than that into it. While he didn't come right out and say it, the implication is that if he was still coaching these guys, they'd still be among the best, toughest defenses in the league, instead of getting flattened on the pavement like Wile E. Coyote week after week.
Extrapolate that further, and it's not hard to think he's suggesting it's not the players who are soft; it's the coaching. That all the talk of guys being free to express themselves, "demanding without being demeaning," getting rid of what Eliot Wolf called "the hard ass vibe" around the building, building a family room and allowing Nerf hoops and bikes in the locker room:
… has directly led to this:
I mean, it's hard to argue anything other than Belichick resents Mayo for taking his job and has no respect for the coaching he's doing. Not when his longtime lieutenant and friend Mike Lombardi is going on Bill Simmons' podcast and claiming Mayo spent last year going up the proverbial back stairs to talk to ownership, even during team meetings (via @ThatJohnIrons):
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It's obvious Lombardi thinks Mayo staged a coup. That this was regicide and he was the usurper. So it follows logically so does Belichick. That he doesn't think much of him as a coach, and resents the way he seems to be passing the blame off on the players he inherited. Student of history that he is, I wouldn't be surprised if he's quoting the old Alexander the Great axiom, "An army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep." And if that he was still the lion in charge, they wouldn't be 1-6 and getting pushed all over the field.
Personally, I cannot wait to see how Mayo's players respond to the challenge he issued. If they go out Sunday and beat the breaks off the Jets, it'll be considered a stroke of genius. An ex-player understanding the psychology of how athletes think. If not, and they play like they did in London, the noise will only get louder. And Belichick's voice will be the one we hear above all the others. I get the feeling he has not yet begun to dunk on the man who replaced him. Gird your loins. We're in for a wild couple of weeks.