Keyshawn Johnson downplays Mac Jones hype: ‘He ain’t Josh Allen’
"We can cover it up however we want to make it look. But...I know what I saw."
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Taking the whole picture into account, it’s hard to think of Mac Jones’s rookie season as anything other than a success.
In a league that so often chews up and spits out young quarterbacks, Jones more than held his own in his first 17 games in the NFL and stood head and shoulders above his fellow rookie quarterbacks after being the fifth passer taken in the first round of the 2022 draft.
But a poor end of the season has pundits and fans alike wondering what’s next for the young Patriots passer and whether or not New England can win a title with him.
When posed that very question on WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show” Friday, former NFL receiver-turned-ESPN-host Keyshawn Johnson gave a less-than-ringing endorsement of Jones’s future prospects.
“He’s a good little piece to what New England wanted to do. When he had to play quarterback, it didn’t work out in their favor,” he said of Jones. “They protected him as much as they could and got enough out of that. Because he looks the part like the New England quarterbacks of the world, the Scott Zolak types, they think they got something.
“Good player, but he ain’t Josh Allen. That’s a problem for them. He ain’t Deshaun Watson. He ain’t Patrick Mahomes. He ain’t Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert, Aaron Rodgers…he’s not that, so you’re going to have a little bit of a problem when he’s asked to do certain things.”
On one hand, that might be a bit of a harsh assessment of a player who had one of the better rookie seasons for a quarterback in recent memory.
Jones now ranks second in completion percentage (67.6), fourth in passing yards (3,801), eighth in touchdowns (22) and 10th in quarterback rating (92.5) among all rookie quarterbacks in NFL history. He also became just the 15th rookie ever to reach 3,000 passing yards and 20 touchdowns in a season.
Though wins aren’t solely a quarterback stat, it’s still worth noting he’s just the eighth rookie ever to win 10 or more games and 12th to lead his team to a winning record.
Just because Jones doesn’t have the physical traits of some of his draft peers, like Trevor Lawrence and Justin Fields, doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement going into next season and beyond. One of his Pro Bowl teammates, Matthew Judon, says he expects Jones to be “100 times better” in 2022.
“Great dude. Very professional. Great leader. I think he has all the intangibles to be a great quarterback in this league for a long time. I think he’s showing that,” the Patriots linebacker told WEEI’s “Merloni and Fauria” on Thursday.
But it is fair to point out how much he struggled late in the season when teams began to exploit his lack of exceptional arm talent and his unwillingness/inability to hurt defenses consistently down the field. Contrast that with the Bills’ Allen, who tore the Patriots apart twice down the stretch this past season.
What’s more: when taking into account athleticism and draft pedigree, some advanced metrics still give the likes of Lawrence and Fields just as good a chance, if not a better one, to become elite players as Jones has in the long run.
Suffice it to say Johnson needs to see more before he believes Jones can duel with the likes of Allen, Mahomes and Herbert in the same conference for the next decade-plus.
“I know, I know, ‘[Mac] won 10 games, how could you say that? He played great for a rookie.’ I get it,” Johnson added. “We can cover it up however we want to make it look. But I ain’t no damn fool. I know what I see.”
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