Tom Brady’s Old Friend & Ex-Teammate Joins Bill Belichick’s Verbal War With Jerod Mayo Over Patriots Disrespect

Is Jerod Mayo a bad head coach? His former superior and multiple Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Belichick certainly thinks so. The Patriots were already doing badly. The last game at Wembley Stadium in the UK saw the Boston team taste dirt in a 32-16 defeat. After the loss, Mayo publicly criticized his players and called them “soft.”

Naturally, this didn’t sit well with Belichick. One who coached the same players last year and led the team in certain metrics. It wasn’t long before the Belichick-Mayo drama found its way into the mainstream media. This time though, NBC analyst Mike Florio and Tom Brady’s former teammate Devin McCourty gave their take on the situation.

Former Patriots cornerback didn’t like the way this situation has played out. It’s kind of unsavory to know that the duo once known as “Jerod Belichick” is taking shots at each other. McCourty made it out to be a father-son dispute between the two since Mayo has played for Belichick and served as his assistant at one point. McCourty “hates” what’s going on.

“I hate to see the way this has all unfolded that they’re not kind of close and Jerod can’t call up Bill as a former colleague, as a coach, and then as your former head coach. I hate that part of this, so hopefully they work this out and we stop seeing these kinds of subtle shots back and forth in the media,” McCourty said in the latest instalment on PFT.

Let’s talk about the match a bit. It was Drake Maye’s first game as a starter where he threw for 276 yards and two touchdowns. But that’s not what Bill Belichick or Jerod Mayo had concerns with. The Pats as a team put up only 38 rushing yards. And that prompted the HC to unapologetically accept that “we are a soft football team across the board” after calling it a “disappointing game.”

So, what counts as a tough football team in Belichick’s protégé’s eyes? It is being able to “run the ball.” And being able to “stop the run.” Talking about stopping the run, the Pats gave away 171 rushing yards to the Jags. Tank Bigsby alone ran for 118 yards and had two touchdowns by the end of the game. The Patriots couldn’t stop a guy who ran the ball 26 times. That’s kind of bad. Don’t you think?

For what it’s worth, McCourty seems to agree with Bill Belichick’s assessment of the situation. So, what did Coach Belichick say that’s got every journalist in the football space running around in a frenzy?

Bill Belichick drops a Jerod Mayo diss

The 8x Super Bowl-winning former coach slam dunked on Jerod Mayo when he called him out for coaching inefficiencies. His main takeaway from Mayo’s presser was that he shouldn’t have done his players dirty in the light of the day. While the former NFL coach acknowledged every coach has a unique style, he laid equal importance on taking accountability.

Taking accountability is what Jerod Mayo might not have done. He threw the team under the bus for crying out loud. Belichick happens to think that Jerod Mayo is not handling the business properly.

“We might have had bad playing but we had bad coaching that led to bad playing so I think it’s always best to take a look at yourself and do what you can do to help the team. And then, you know, if you have constructive criticism as a coach, that’s your job,” Bill Belichick told Tom Brady and Jim Gray on SiriusXM’s Let’s Go podcast.

But the veteran coach owned Jerod Mayo when he pointed out that the team was leading in rushing defense and yards per carry. This year though, as Belichick put it, the Patriots are 26 in those metrics. He was working with the same players as the present Patriots roster last year and the results were completely different.

As it happens, Tom Brady concurs with Belichick’s assessment of the current New England Patriots team. That’s because the former Pats coach imparted the same teaching to the GOAT quarterback. “I think the thing I always learned from coach Belichick was there’s actually statistics that support that”¦.Toughness was about stopping the run running the football and covering kicks. And if we did all three of those things on the teams that I was a part of, we considered ourselves a physical football team.”

With that being said, Jerod Mayo might have to learn to adopt a Mike Tomlin-esque attitude when it comes to handling the media. One of the common things between Belichick and Tomlin is clear: they don’t speak up until they have all the facts and figures. That sort of wisdom on and off the field will take Jerod Mayo and his Patriots a long way.