On Monday, Patriots first-year head coach Jerod Mayo made his weekly appearance with The Greg Hill Show, sans WEEI’s Greg Hill and Chris Curtis.
With their chairs vacant, WEEI’s Jermaine Wiggins had his son Jaden seated next to him for his conversation with the coach, who was coming off a 24-21 loss in Buffalo that dropped his team’s record to 3-12 with two games left in the season.
As the interview was coming to a close, the younger Wiggins chimed in, asking Mayo to walk the audience through his thought process once the offseason arrives after his team’s final two games.
“Look, I try to stay as present as possible,” said Mayo. “But the reality is, you always have to look out the front windshield when you’re trying to build a team.
“You know, for me - after we get through the season, there are a lot of things, a lot of checklists, that you have to go through. You know, what players you want to keep around, what coaches you want to keep around here. How the process of the season - like what I did right, what I did wrong, I have to put a mirror in front of my face. And it starts with me, you know, putting a mirror in front of my face and really just going through the things that I have to get better at going forward.”
While the offseason will seemingly be filled with time for introspection for Mayo, it’s clear that some of that has already gone on for the 38-year-old head coach.
“Look - everything that we’ve done this year, you know, from a process standpoint, I mean, some of it’s been good, some of it’s been bad,” said Mayo. “But that is part of being, you know, in your first year. Whether you’re first-year or whatever - first-year and you wanna be a journalist, like, it’s a learning experience. But the most important thing is to be able to reflect and be honest with yourself, you know, when you didn’t do things the right way, or when you did it the wrong way.”
On its surface, this is an answer that seems like a pretty generic way to treat an offseason - reflect on what you did, and try to get better.
But when you read this answer through the context of the reporting surrounding Mayo’s job security leading into Week 16, you can glean that New England’s head coach feels like he’s retaining that title for a second season in 2025.
While Mayo made it clear earlier in the interview that he’s not looking for any sort of public declaration from the Krafts that his job is safe regardless of what happens on the field in Weeks 17 and 18, and answer like the one he gave can lead you to believe that this type of declaration has, indeed, been delivered privately.
Mayo and the Patriots look to snap their five-game losing streak on Saturday against the Los Angeles Chargers (9-6), with kickoff set for 1:00 p.m. ET at Gillette Stadium.
New England is currently listed as a 5.5-point home underdog at both BetMGM and FanDuel.