Three days after the comment, Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo calling his squad “a soft football team” has continued to age poorly.
While Mayo at least partially walked back the comment on The Greg Hill Show on Monday, it’s fair to wonder what kind of damage the pointed criticism may have done. Could Mayo be in danger of losing the locker room in his first year?
“I would think he's at a level of risk,” Tom E. Curran of NBC Sports Boston said Tuesday on WEEI’s Jones and Keefe.
“You had a bad enough performance on the field to lose 32-16. It wasn't that close…they could have put up 40 on you, they didn't. You have enough to deal with without marching to the podium and unsolicited calling the team soft. Not saying they're playing soft, calling them soft,” Curran continued.
Mayo’s gaffe was only made worse because the Patriots game was an early-morning Europe game, which meant the media could zero in on his comments for hours on Sunday.
“That turns into, at 1 in the afternoon or 12:30, a feast for the rest of the day. ‘What happened between those one and five teams in Europe? Yeah, not much, except the head coach said [that] his team was soft. I've never heard that before, I've never really heard that before from a first-year head coach. Wow, that's worth diving into.’ So, again, unforced errors,” Curran said.
Given that Mayo isn’t a member of the media or some former player appearing on a podcast, he can’t say that his team is soft without offering a solution.
“When you are going to turn the gun on your locker room in that fashion, what are you doing to help them out?” Curran asked.
“When I watch a defense get run on 18 consecutive times the way DeMarcus Covington’s was, and they don't really do anything to say, ‘You know what? I don't care how many people we have to put in the box, you’re not doing that to us anymore. If we have to put the entire franchise in there, we're doing it.’ Not doing that, just dangles them out to dry.”
It was reasonable to expect some hiccups for the New England Patriots this season as they began rebuilding the team. But Curran calls what’s happened to the team so far this year a “worst-case scenario” for Mayo and owner Robert Kraft.
“I think they all acknowledged, Mayo included, definitely Kraft, ‘Look, this is going to be a year with some bumps and fits and starts.’ I don't think in their wildest dreams did they play out and game-play [the] worst-case scenario, but this is playing out as worst-case scenario,” Curran said.
“I just don't think that with a first-year head coach, first-year coordinator, first-year coordinator on the defensive side, that they ever game-played that it was going to be this bad. So, Mayo needs help.”
To make matters worse, Mayo’s predecessor, six-time Super Bowl champion Bill Belichick, weighed in, criticizing his word choice while also praising his former players.
“Bill Belichick is not wrong,” Curran said, adding that Belichick is “certainly power-washing his last few years here, but he's not wrong. You can't call the team soft.”
Even with what Belichick says on The Pat McAfee Show about how great the Patriots were last year, and Mayo’s frequent miscues, Curran believes that Kraft made the correct decision to change the head coach.
“Were the Patriots correct in deciding that they didn't want Bill in charge of another rebuild and to spend all the money that they had? I would say that they were. They gave him a shot, it didn't work out, he's 72. But pretending that it was, ‘Boy [we] just needed a few more minutes here to get it right’ is cuckoo,” Curran said.
Still, Curran says the old guy still knows a thing or two when he calls out Mayo.
“With all that said, he’s not wrong.”