When Jerod Mayo was named the new Patriots head coach earlier this year, he said he would work to “rebuild some relationships, knock down silos and collaborate” in his new role.
Those weren’t things that got talked about much when Bill Belichick was running the shop in New England and the style change was a topic for director of scouting Eliot Wolf as well. Wolf said at the Scouting Combine in Indianapolis on Tuesday that he and Mayo hoped to have an “open, kind of less hard-ass type vibe in the building.”
On Wednesday, Mayo, who played for Belichick before joining his coaching staff, was careful to say that none of that is meant as a knock on the approach the Patriots used during Belichick’s long and successful run with the organization.
“It’s going to be different, but at the same time I would say Bill did a great job for a long period of time,” Mayo said, via Mike Reiss of ESPN.com. “I don’t want you to take this as ‘because we’re changing, there are shots toward the previous regime.’ In saying that, we will do it differently and it will feel different. But at the end of the day, we would like to replicate the success that the prior regime has had. I learned a lot from Bill and also his staff. Now we’ll see what this chapter looks like in the franchise.”
Neither Mayo nor Wolf is Belichick, so it wouldn’t behoove them to try to play that role now that they are running the ship. The question for the Patriots is if their way will result in a return to the kind of results that have eluded them in recent years.
