New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick “absolutely” feels the same way about quarterback Mac Jones right now as he did entering the 2022 season, when the former first-round draft pick was coming off a Pro Bowl year.
That’s certainly a relief for Patriots fans considering most of the offseason reports have been about the two being at odds with each other last season. For the first time in a while, Belichick actually seemed complimentary of Jones last week, during the 2023 NFL draft.
Before the draft, Belichick seemed mostly non-committal to Jones as the starting quarterback for the Patriots. There was even talk of the team showing “real interest” in Kentucky quarterback Will Levis, who was invited to New England on a pre-draft visit.
NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport has an interesting theory for why that might have happened.
“Look, Belichick has not committed to Mac Jones over the last couple of months. My read—and this is just a read on this thing—is he wanted to let people wonder if he was going to take a quarterback in the draft,” said Rapoport. “They were never taking Will Levis, but they brought him into the facility for a visit.
“Maybe they wanted another team to jump over them if they wanted Levis. Maybe they wanted the team in the second round to jump over them if they wanted a quarterback. I think Bill Belichick liked the advantage of keeping teams guessing, and only after it was clear they weren’t taking a quarterback early could they say, ‘Yeah, Mac is our guy.’”
Once again, this was just a theory from Rapoport, but from the sounds of it, he really could be onto something.
Belichick, like any great coach or general manager, is always looking for an edge. Getting teams to buy into the reports that they were actually looking to draft a quarterback with the No. 14 overall pick is chess-like gamesmanship.
That doesn’t change the fact that Jones and the offense still have a lot to prove in the 2023 season. But with new offensive coaches, new receiving weapons and a deeper offensive line, they’ll be in a much better position to do so this time around.
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Story originally appeared on Patriots Wire