The New England Patriots aren’t trading Mac Jones, at least not this year, according to team insider Tom E. Curran.
Jones has been the subject of much speculation lately, with a breakdown in his relationship with head coach Bill Belichick thought to have spelled the end for him in Boston. But the Pats might not be done with him yet.
The quarterback was reported to have sought solutions for the Pats’ offense from external sources last season, which is believed to have angered Belichick.
His play wasn’t enough to get the coach to consider forgetting his missteps either as he ranked 28th out of 31 quarterbacks who qualified for ESPN’s QBR metric while the team missed the playoffs. However, Curran has said that there’s no chance Jones gets traded this year.
“Absolutely, positively not,” he said on the Rich Eisen Show this Wednesday. “That would happen over Robert Kraft’s dead body. We’ll talk about that in 2024 if it’s another mediocre season, but this notion that the Patriots would move on from Mac Jones after last July at the outset of training camp, when Bill Belichick talked about Mac Jones making drastic improvements from an already highly-impressive rookie year…
“If they now want to move on from him and his ($ 4.25 million) salary because of what happened in 2022? Well, who’s holding the smoking gun for what happened? The coach!”
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To be fair to Jones, he wasn’t put in the best position to thrive as Matt Patricia and Joe Judge were handed offensive coaching roles despite their complete lack of experience.
Curran added: “I think if Bill walked to Robert Kraft and said, ‘I’m thinking about moving on from Mac here; he was really surly,’ I think Robert Kraft would say, ‘Are you out of your mind? When he’s making $ 4 million? He was a good player last year, he’s a bad player now and you want to move on from him? Why is that?’ And (Belichick) would have to say, ‘Well, we did nothing to help him.”
It makes sense that Mac should have the upper hand there. Belichick did him no favors in 2022, so to try getting rid of him now would be really unfair. Next year might prove to be a different case, however.
