FOXBORO, Mass. — A week ago, in London, Jerod Mayo said the soft part out loud in explaining the New England Patriots’ bow-wow effort against the Jacksonville Jaguars at Wembley Stadium.
“We’re a soft football team across the board,” is how the first-year coach of the last-place Patriots put it, and who could argue with that?
Tell you what: Let’s argue with that, at least for a day or two. Let’s argue with that because of what happened on Sunday, which happens to be the day the Patriots registered a 25-22 victory over the New York Jets at Gillette Stadium.
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For if ever a team was going to lug its softness out to the field and submit 60 minutes of mail-it-in football, the Patriots were the team and Sunday was the day. Having already been called out by their coach in jolly old England, the Pats then lost their quarterback of the future at cranky old Foxboro when rookie Drake Maye suffered a second-quarter concussion. What that meant was a return to the huddle by Jacoby Brissett, the veteran journeyman who’d been brought in to mind the shop while Maye was learning the ropes.
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To summarize: You’re 1-6, your coach is comparing you to Reddi-Wip and now Maye is out after taking a helmet-to-helmet hit from the Jets’ Jamien Sherwood that strangely didn’t get flagged.
The Pats won this game with 22 seconds remaining when Rhamondre Stevenson busted in for a 1-yard touchdown run. But let’s roll the tape of this drive back to third-and-10 at the Jets 43, with about a minute and a half remaining. Under pressure, Brissett managed to fling the ball toward the goal line where Kayshon Boutte, who’d been having an ugly game, decided to make a beautiful catch.
“Kayshon made a great play,” Brissett said. “I felt like I underthrew it. As soon as it came off my hand, I was like, ‘Damn.’ He made an unbelievable play, a play that we needed at that time.”
.@JBrissett12 threading it to @KayshonBoutte1 🎯
📺: CBS pic.twitter.com/oAgSg7YsTS
— New England Patriots (@Patriots) October 27, 2024
Some of what Brissett is saying here is true. Where he errs is in underreporting his own contribution to that completion. What’s also being sidestepped here is that recent events suggested there’d be no way “Brissett to Boutte” would be the secret sauce to put the Patriots on victory’s doorstep. Boutte had a couple of misses in the second half. And Brissett had to suffer the indignity of being sent to the bench three weeks ago when Maye was deemed ready.
Let’s not forget that Brissett didn’t exactly rise to the occasion on New England’s previous drive. Brissett did what he could, including completions to Hunter Henry (12 yards) and Tyquan Thornton (14 yards), but he momentarily fumbled the ball on second-and-goal at the New York 2, losing four yards, and he couldn’t connect with Kendrick Bourne on third down. The Pats settled for a 23-yard Joey Slye field goal to take a 17-16 lead.
But the lead didn’t last long because the Jets went 70 yards on 10 plays, with Braelon Alen going in from 2 yards out. The Jets’ conversion try failed, but so what? With under three minutes remaining, the soft-serve Patriots needed a touchdown. As if that was going to happen.
After it did happen, and after the Patriots had claimed their first victory since opening day in Cincinnati, the noise from the New England locker room was seeping out through the cement in such a way that it could be heard in the hallways ‘neath Gillette Stadium.
“(Screw) the Jets,” one Patriot could be heard shouting. If anyone in uniform said anything along those lines about Mayo, it was not the prevailing feeling among the players.
“I don’t think I’ve ever really questioned the resilience of this team,” Mayo said. “I’m not going to go back to those comments. What I will say is we have a room full of guys with the mentality that you’ve got to change the page every day. Every day is a new day. We have to get better and … ”
And blah, blah, blah. The fact is that Mayo absolutely did question the resilience of this team when he called his players “soft.” But guess what: Nobody seemed to care after Sunday’s victory over the Jets. As cornerback Christian Gonzalez put it, “He said it, but that isn’t something he didn’t say to us first. Nobody took it personally. It’s a challenge, and we came out and did what we had to do.”
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That next man up mentality. pic.twitter.com/U6O0otOKxH
— New England Patriots (@Patriots) October 27, 2024
Yes, the opposition was the Jets, and the Jets are, well, the Jets. It didn’t help that Aaron Rodgers played like a quarterback whose best years are behind him. He completed 17 of 28 passes for 233 yards and two touchdowns, seemingly through guile and experience. The great ones can do that.
Teams that have been called out by their coach as “soft” can sometimes turn the narrative in a different direction, if only for a day, a few days, a week. Look at it this way: Had the Patriots lost on Sunday, by a lot or a little, Mayo’s comment about this team being soft would have been given a fresh coat of varnish.
But the Patriots won. There’s no need to point out the many players who felt the need to say, “It’s hard to win in the NFL,” because everybody understands that. What doesn’t get enough attention is the opposite way of looking at it, which is that it’s easy to lose in the NFL, especially when you’ve given up.
The Patriots did not give up on Sunday.
The Patriots were not soft on Sunday.
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(Photo of Rhamondre Stevenson and Ben Brown: Adam Glanzman / Getty Images)
