FOXBOROUGH — Over the first week of Patriots training camp, all everyone wants to know is how Cam Newton and Mac Jones look on a given day.
What were their stats? How many completions? How many interceptions?
But, when asked about them Wednesday, Patriots offensive coordinator said while he has an idea of what they are, he’s not really paying much attention to them this time of year.
“It’s more about the process, I think,” he said. “Right now, everybody is in a learning phase. To me, what we’re trying to focus on is everybody getting enough reps at the core foundational things in our offense. When we’re charting, I’m not charting — I mean, I know how many completions and incompletions we have because I am an offensive coach — but that’s really not the important part for me right now.
“The important part for me is are we improving in our protection identification? Are we improving in our blitz pickup? Are we improving in our route techniques? For the quarterbacks, are we improving in our read progressions, our throwing mechanics? Those are the things really that are going to carry us through the entire season. It’s not going to be, ‘Well, did we hit this today? Did we hit that the other day?’ Eventually, as we all know we’re going to end up dwindling down the team and all the rest of it and those guys will get more reps together, but right now everybody is taking reps and trying to build our foundation so we can carry ourselves the entire length of the season, which is really what this time to me is all about.”
So, as it relates to the quarterback battle, at least as of now, it doesn’t seem worth reading too much into the stats.
With that being said, they can still be a piece of context to how a quarterback performed on a given day, just not the end-all be-all.