For the latest on the Patriots, check out WEEI and Audacy's "1st and Foxborough."
If you need a short and sweet summary of how plausible the Patriots trading Mac Jones would be, NBC Sports Boston’s Tom Curran has you covered.
Appearing on the Rich Eisen Show, Curran laid the smackdown on recent rumors that the Patriots should go beyond simply listening to trade offers for Jones and actually do it.
“Absolutely, positively not,” he said. "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 a drastic improvement from an already highly impressive rookie year -- if they now want to move on from him and his $4.36 million salary or whatever it is because of what happened in 2022, who's holding the smoking gun for what happened? That coach! The decisions.
"I think that if he walked to Robert Kraft and said, 'I'm thinking of moving on from Mac here, he was really surly," I think Robert Kraft would say, 'Are you out of your mind? He's making $4 million. He was a good player last year. He's a bad player now…Why is that?' Then you'd have to say, because we did nothing to help him. So I think any speculation that Mac Jones would be trade bait or a trade object in 2023 is coo coo."
Well…there you have it.
From a practical standpoint, it's not as if trying to trade Jones makes much sense anyway. It's not as if the Patriots would get a first-round pick for him coming off a bad 2022 season. If you're not at least getting that, what's the point?
On the field, we already know what Jones can look like when he has a competent offensive coach -- something New England didn't give him last season. Suggesting the Patriots should cut bait with Jones just because he played poorly and lashed out at points due to mistakes they made as a coaching staff is letting Bill Belichick skate for his role in what happened.
It would also be foolish from a value perspective: throwing away a chance to build a strong roster around a cheap quarterback who has shown he can do the job when he's supported properly. If New England doesn't want to do that, that's not wholly Mac Jones' problem.
In any case, don't overthink the trade speculation. Jones will almost certainly be the team's starting quarterback when the season opens this fall and have his shot to prove 2022 was an aberration. If it's not, then we can start talking about new quarterbacks for the Patriots.
