Jerod Mayo could have splintered the Patriots by calling them ‘soft.’ Instead, they rallied for a hard win.
"That's just a testament to his coaching and how we are receptive to him as a coach," Keion White said.
Commentary
It wasn’t just that the Patriots beat Aaron Rodgers and the overhyped Jets a week after coach Jerod Mayo publicly called them a “soft football team” that made Sunday’s win remarkable.
It’s how they did it.
The Patriots, who were without rookie quarterback Drake Maye (concussion), had 4th and goal on the 1 yard line with less than 30 seconds to go.
They had to fight right down to the final yard to get this win, and were able to punch the ball in for the go-ahead score.
They were soft last week. As Mayo said, they couldn’t run the ball, they couldn’t stop the run, and they couldn’t cover kicks. If the message sounds familiar, it’s because he got the definition from former coach Bill Belichick, who fanned the flames with his comments on The Pat McAfee Show by saying he was ‘hurt’ for the players.
The Patriots played anything but soft in the closing moments this week. Mayo called out his team, and they responded to the challenge.
Defensive end Keion White said he did not take offense to Mayo’s words because Mayo did not say anything that he didn’t tell the team face to face.
“And so, when somebody calls you out as a man, you can’t get all sensitive about it,” White said. “You just have to say ‘OK, I’m going to show you’ and take it as a challenge and I think we did that. That’s just a testament to his coaching and how we are receptive to him as a coach because we didn’t get defensive and we didn’t shut down. We took it as a challenge.”
Tight-end Austin Hooper shrugged when asked if the message was one that the struggling team needed to hear.
“If it helped some guys, for sure,” Hooper said. “But, I mean at the end of the day once you step in there you’ve got to be professional and whatever you put on tape is who you are. It’s just a matter of personal pride. I’m sure that probably motivated some in this locker room, but for us in this tight-end room all we took was like ‘alright, we need more.'”
“We need to push a little harder,” Hooper added. “We need to be in the meetings a little more, meet here or there, do whatever, soak up all the little details we can so we can just get over the hump. You can’t just stay in games in this league, you’ve got to get it done, so I’m happy for the whole team today … this is what you do it all for, training camp, OTA’s, all that is for moments like this.”
A smiling Davon Godchaux said it felt good to get some revenge against the Jets.
“It felt good man, I’m not going to lie. Divisional game made it even better. I remember walking off the field last year, last game of the season when we played them in the snow. Just a salty feeling, them running the ball down our throat and getting a win. It was pretty bad. So, it’s always good to come back and beat the Jets at home.”
Here are a few more notes from the locker room.
Bourne addresses struggles
After the game, Kendrick Bourne tweeted out a message to Patriots fans promising that he will play better.
Bourne, who now has four games under his belt after returning from an ACL tear, has four catches for 29 yards and zero touchdowns this season. He had zero catches on three targets on Sunday.
The veteran pass-catcher, who was the Patriots most productive receiver at the time of his injury last year, took accountability for his poor play while standing at his locker.
“Personally, I’ve just got to play better, man,” Bourne said. “I hated that game. I just played so bad. So, I’ve just got to look in the mirror too, you know? I’ve got to make more plays and just as a group we’ve got to just focus in and play better.”
Clock work
The Patriots were booed loudly heading into halftime after running the clock out while down by a touchdown.
The move could easily be viewed as conservative. The Patriots had 1:51 on the clock, but the Patriots gave the ball to Rhamondre Stevenson twice and let Jacoby Brissett kill the clock on the final play of the half.
With Brissett taking over for Maye, Mayo thought simply getting to halftime would be the right call.
“At the end of the half you lose your starting quarterback, you just want to get the clock running so we can reset at halftime,” he said. “That was really the mentality there. I know the fans and stuff, they don’t like it. They always want to try to go out there. I would say it was just a chance for us to get in the locker room, hit the reset button.”
Back to basics
The Patriots held the Jets to 112 rushing yards, their lowest total since their loss to New York in Week 3.
“It’s really the guys going out there and executing,” Mayo said. “There’s no magic pill or magic drink or anything like that. It’s a mentality that we’re going to stop the run. I thought for the most part we did stop the run. Saying that, we’ll go back and watch the film. There were a few that popped on us a little bit. We’ll get those corrected.”
The key mentality change, according to Godchaux, was that the Patriots decided to stop trying to be “cute.”
“We really just stopped all the cute [expletive] and really just got back to the basics,” Godchaux said. “Just knockback football, play our assignments, not a lot of calls, and do what we do.”
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