New England Patriots Thought’s After Friday’s Preseason Loss To The Raiders

By: Steve Atkinson

The Patriots open the season in two weeks against the Miami Dolphins. Friday night’s preseason game against the Raiders was telling especially on offense. Mac Jones and the offense couldn’t move the ball down the field that well. While on the other side former Patriot Jarrett Stidham was tearing up the Patriots’ defense for the Raiders. Josh McDaniels now the head coach of the Raiders is using the offense he had while being the offensive coordinator for the Patriots. Stidham was all set because he’s been running with the same offense for 4 years. Meanwhile, Mac Jones has really no offensive coordinator and is running a new offense with difficulty.

Patriots Looked Bad in Friday Night’s Loss to The Raiders

I really wanted to give the new offense a chance seeing that Bill Belichick was running things. However, after Friday night I don’t know how you can come away with a lot of questions when your former offensive coordinator is on the other side putting Stidham in the best chance to succeed. While Belichick has Matt Patricia and Joe Judge FOB (friends of Bill) calling plays out to Mac Jones and now going anywhere.

The Patriots Offensive Questions.

Belichick wants to make it harder on himself and to prove he can be a good coach without Tom Brady. this is asking a lot of a second-year quarterback, but Jones is going to have to make a big step in buy-in like Brady did. Players bought in because they knew that they had a great quarterback that would win them games no matter what. Jones is going to have to be that guy. I doubt they will change the offense back to the way it was before the opener against Miami on September 11th. The offense will have to start off strong and Jones will have to do what’s best for the team in certain situations. He may have to call plays at the line himself and not listen to Jude or Patricia if they call something he doesn’t like. This was Belichick after the game on Friday.

“Alright, well we didn’t have a really good night tonight in any phase of the game. That’s obvious. Might have left it on the practice field on Tuesday and Wednesday. Certainly practiced a lot better than we played out there tonight. Obviously, I need to clean up a lot of things here. We just didn’t play well in any phase of the game. We didn’t play with any kind of consistency. A couple of touchdowns called back, turned the ball over, didn’t play good defense, didn’t play well in the kicking game. I’ve obviously got to do a better job and so, it starts with me. We’ll get back to work this week and work on what kind of things we need to work on. Like I said, it’s disappointing because we did things a lot better in practice against the Raiders than we did tonight. Hopefully, we can regain that level of execution and performance.”

The amount of heat that Bill Belichick is going to get if they get off to a rough start isn’t going to be good. People will blame him for the regression of Mac Jones. The only way to fix it is for Jones to cover up the holes like Brady did all those years. If I’m Jones I call Brady and ask him for advice on how to deal with all the hype surrounding playing for Belichick. He needs a confidence boost before the season starts. Why not contact the greatest to ever play and the one that knows Belichick the best?