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Yes, he’s coming back as an offensive coordinator, and not a head coach. Sure, he’s working for the greatest head coach of all time in Bill Belichick. But in returning to his first home in pro football, and his actual hometown, he’s inheriting a situation that comes with a lot of strings attached, evidenced by last week’s Mac Jones news from .
Among those strings …
• Jones rankled Belichick and last year’s offensive staff with the way he handled adversity. Some of that adversity, of course, was created by Belichick’s unorthodox decision to install Matt Patricia (a defensive coach) as offensive coordinator and Joe Judge (a special teams coach) as quarterbacks coach. So there is plenty of blame to go around. Regardless of how you’d split that blame up, Jones lost support in the building with the way he managed the challenges of the season.
• Fourth-round pick Bailey Zappe shined when Jones got hurt, and the incumbent staff felt like a big reason for that, in addition to an offensive plan adjusted to fit him, was that Zappe was following the coaching. The staff did try some concepts built to get Zappe playing fast by eating up easy yardage and used those same concepts for Jones. The result was the coaching staff came out of the year feeling the difference between the two quarterbacks (as we said in the mailbag) wasn’t massive.
• Jones’s superpower as a player is his mind, and how fast he sees the game. He’s not a guy who, if things go wrong, or if he senses trouble, has a physical escape hatch to make things happen such as Josh Allen or Patrick Mahomes do. So if Jones is not able to make an offense work for him—either because the offense isn’t good enough or he’s not buying into it—it’s going to look messy. And it did last year.
• Belichick’s support of Jones has been incredibly tepid publicly, and that was before ’s news posted last week. The head coach repeatedly refused to declare Jones the starter for the rest of the year after his injury, oversaw a QB shuttle in a bad loss to the Bears last year and more or less declared last week Zappe will have a chance to win the job.
So that’s what O’Brien has to navigate.
Now, the good news, as we mentioned last week, is that Jones has been at the facility to lift, throw and relationship-build with his new offensive coaches (Zappe has been, too), as those coaches basically rebuild the playbook. Also, O’Brien’s coming from Alabama, a place where Jones showed the qualities over and over that turned a physically limited QB into a first-rounder, which gives the coordinator powerful institutional knowledge to work with.
It’ll be fascinating to see where O’Brien, an accomplished offensive coordinator who was better as a head coach with the Texans and Penn State than you may remember, takes this. And, to be sure, it figures to be a pretty major swing factor in what’s shaping up to be a pivotal season for the franchise.
