Patriots quarterback Mac Jones had a rough day on Sunday against the Cowboys. Offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien regards it as an aberration.
“Some of the decisions that he made were very uncharacteristic of Mac,” O’Brien told reporters on Tuesday, via Mike Reiss of ESPN.com. “He’s just trying to make a play, he’s wanting to win, he’s very competitive. I think you’ll see a lot of improvement in Mac as we keep moving forward here.”
The “just trying to make a play” excuse is another way of saying “he tried to do too much.” Whatever he tried to do, it wasn’t enough. And some are now wondering whether it ever really will be.
“Mac is a battler,” O’Brien said. “He is a competitor. When you play quarterback in this league, you have to limit the mistakes and you have to limit the bad games you have, obviously. . . . We have to do a better job of coaching up some things with him. He has to do a better job of making good decisions for us. He knows that. He takes a lot of ownership -- you saw that, I think, after the game. He blames himself.”
It wasn’t supposed to be that way this year. In 2022, he was working with a crayons and safety-scissors offense. This year, he’s supposed to have a much more sophisticated and complicated — and effective — attack.
O’Brien also emphasized that it wasn’t all Mac’s fault.
“The game wasn’t lost because of one guy,” O’Brien said. “The game was lost, on our part, because of how poorly we played and coached in the game. . . . We have a lot of belief in Mac; I think he’ll get back to doing it the way he knows how to do it.”
There’s a chance O’Brien is right. The Cowboys will be gobbling up plenty of teams this year, making quick work with a swarming defense that helps to build a lead that allows the swarming defense to swarm even more.
“You can’t let things get out of hand, and that’s what happened, because we didn’t do a good enough job of stemming the tide and fixing things right away and going back to our fundamentals,” O’Brien said. “You always have to play mentally within yourself. It doesn’t mean that you can’t take calculated risks; it just means that you have to do a really good job of making sure that you understand what we’re trying to do on every play and executing that play to the best of your ability at a high level, and take what the defense gives you. . . . I would say, for the most part, Mac does that. We’re going to work really hard this week to improve some things.”
The Patriots have a couple of winnable games coming, against the Saints and the Raiders, before things take a turn toward the Bills and the Dolphins.
