Jerod Mayo is once again clarifying a polarizing comment.
From “burning cash” to weekly ambiguity about the quarterback situation, Mayo has early on in his head coaching career made a habit of saying something head-turning, only to walk it back days later.
Such is the case this week, with Mayo saying after the latest embarrassing display – a 32-16 loss to the Jaguars in London – that the Patriots are “a soft football team.” At 1-6 and getting their doors blown off weekly, it’s a tough to argue from the outside. Hearing it from the coach though takes things to a different level.
So, when he made his weekly appearance Monday on The Greg Hill Show, Mayo corrected his comments.
“(We’re) playing soft. Look, let me just go ahead and correct that. We’re playing soft,” Mayo said. “If you go back to training camp, there was definitely toughness all around the place. We still have the same players, we’ve just got to play that way.”
Mayo was asked to define what makes a soft versus tough football team.
“We’ve got to be able to run the ball, we have to stop the run and cover kicks, and we did none of those (against Jacksonville),” Mayo said. “That’s what equals a tough football time.”
The state of the roster has been highly scrutinized. There was undoubtedly a precipitous drop in talent during Bill Belichick’s final years, but Mayo has come under fire for seemingly leaning too heavily on the missteps of his predecessor as excuses for this season.
So, was last year’s team soft?
“At times. Last year we played soft at times,” Mayo said. “There have always been games within each individual season where you feel like you played soft that game. Like I said to correct what I said, we don’t have a soft football team, we are just been playing soft the last few weeks.”