The bumpy summer ride for the new Patriots offense took a road trip this week for joint practice action with the Raiders in Las Vegas.
And via a flurry of Twitter reports from Sin City, the outcome of the workout in the desert heat were less than impressive, continuing what has been a struggle for Mac Jones and his offense to adjust to a “streamlined” system under the direction of Bill Belichick, Matt Patricia and Joe Judge.
We all understand that change can be hard and the “new” offense is a work in progress, especially with the guy who successfully ran the New England offense for years now working across the practice field for the Silver and Black, former Patriots offensive coordinator-turned-Raiders head coach Josh McDaniels.
The problem is that the Patriots have been working – practice action, joint practice work with the Panthers and now Raiders and even preseason game competition against the Giants and Panthers – for nearly a full month and from the outside looking in there simply doesn’t appear to be all that much progress from all that work. And that doesn’t even account for all the OTA and mini-camp reps from the spring.
Belichick has continually called his offense – and the question of who will be calling the plays for the unit – a process. Many of his players have parroted the term, too, including Jones.
Following Tuesday’s at-times ugly and frustrating joint practice session in Las Vegas, Jones joined the “Merloni, Fauria and Mego” show as part of the 20th annual WEEI/NESN Jimmy Fund Radio-Telethon (Click here to donate!) and was asked if the failure on the practice field is part of the process that the second-year quarterback must accept.
“I think failure is putting a label on something that’s not the process,” Jones said. “Like you said, we’re just trying to focus on the process and not the result. And failure would be considered a result. So we’re just trying to work through it all. Like you said it’s just doing the basic things better. We can all do that. I can do that better. Just get the ball to the open guy and carry on to the next play. Sometimes we don’t need to overcomplicate it. It’s football and it’s a simple game if you make it a simple game. We’re all trying to get there. It doesn’t happen overnight. And we’re making good progress, so that’s all you can ask for.”
How much progress is indeed being made is debatable. What isn’t debatable is that Jones & Co. are running out of time to simply focus on the process and not worry about the result.
Ready or not, the regular season opener against Tyreek Hill, Mike McDaniel and the new-look, upstart Dolphins in Miami is on Sept. 11. That gives Jones and the rest little more than two weeks to pick up the pace on the process and get to a point where the results are coming at a consistent, productive, competitive NFL level.
Failure on the practice field can be rationalized as part of the process.
Failure on the game field is called a loss.
The process is fine for the summer, for the practice field and even preseason action.
Come September, everyone is going to be focused on the result for Jones and his Patriots.
That time is coming fast, whether he wants to talk about it or not.
