With the dust settled and the 2022 season in the rearview, it feels safe to say that New England Patriots quarterback Mac Jones played poorly in Year 2.

Of course, Jones’ performance does not exist in a vacuum, and we’ll get into the extenuating circumstances here in a minute, but pick a stat as basic or complex as you like, and Jones probably finished pretty far down the list of NFL quarterbacks last season.

He was 26th out of 31 qualified passers in EPA (expected points added) per play, 28th in success rate, 20th in CPOE (completion percentage over expected), 27th in adjusted EPA per play and 28th in EPA + CPOE composite. Not great.

He was 22nd in PFF grade, 20th in PFF passing grade, ninth in big-time throw rate, 12th lowest in turnover-worthy play rate, 21st in adjusted completion percentage and had the 29th PFF passing grade under pressure.

He went 6-8 as a starter and completed 65.2 percent of his passes for 2,997 yards with 14 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. New England won two of the three games he didn’t start including the two contests started by rookie Bailey Zappe. Zappe also played most of two games New England lost — a hard-fought overtime loss to the Green Bay Packers started by Brian Hoyer and an embarrassing shellacking at the hands of the Chicago Bears on Monday Night Football in which Jones played the first quarter.

All of this is to say that while Jones was not necessarily abysmal in 2022 (and he actually showed some pretty dramatic improvements from Week 12 on, when he was PFF’s seventh-highest graded passer), he definitely struggled overall in Year 2.

Now, those extenuating circumstances.

Jones had a former defensive coordinator and defensive-minded head coach in Matt Patricia calling offensive plays and coaching the offensive line and a former special-teams coordinator and maybe unqualified head coach in Joe Judge coaching quarterbacks. So, there’s at least an excuse for why he dropped in essentially every single statistical category. But there should have been some built-in improvement from Year 1 to Year 2 that would have made up for some of that drop-off, and maybe it did. Maybe if he didn’t work hard last offseason, then he and the Patriots’ offense would have been even worse.

The No. 1 issue with the Patriots’ offense, Jones and the team in general is that head coach Bill Belichick so poorly managed New England’s offense last season that there’s no true way of knowing what the team actually has in Jones. 

ProFootballTalk reported Tuesday that the Patriots shopped Jones this offseason. Currently, he’s still on the team, and it seems likely that will continue into the 2023 season. Who would give up significant capital for Jones at this point? Yes, he’s a quarterback on a rookie contract, but no one around the NFL knows what to expect out of him. Is he definitively one of the best 32 quarterbacks in the NFL after this year’s draft class enters the NFL? Maybe, maybe not. Quarterbacks typically improve from Year 1 to Year 2. Jones didn’t. And there’s probably a reason for that. But it’s still a red flag and he's not exactly an asset for which you want to trade or hand over the keys to the organization.

The Patriots brought in offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien with hopes that the unit will improve in 2023. They also hired offensive line coach Adrian Klemm and made changes at running back, wide receiver and tight end, replacing Damien Harris with James Robinson, Jakobi Meyers and Nelson Agholor with JuJu Smith-Schuster and Jonnu Smith with Mike Gesicki. The biggest way for the offense is to improve is the play of Jones.

There isn’t a sense of outright certainty that Jones will take a massive step forward this season in sources around Jones or the team, however. The Patriots hope that Jones will improve under O’Brien, but there’s neither confidence nor doubt that he will. The team has neutral expectations for the QB with the hopefulness that changes will help him improve, per a source with knowledge of the situation.

There’s also the issue of tension between Belichick and Jones. One source put it best: “Plenty of blame to go around.” Belichick put two buddies with little experience running an offense in charge of a QB in Year 2 when he should be making his most significant leap. Jones could have handled that better both with his temperament on the field and his attitude behind the scenes. Even people close to Jones seem frustrated with how he’s handled himself as a pro. But he certainly still has the support of the Kraft family, which could also have some deeper meaning since there also have been reports of tension between Belichick and owner Robert Kraft.

But Belichick wouldn’t even name Jones the starting quarterback last week at the NFL Annual Meeting. Kraft went the other way.

“I’m a big fan of Mac,” Kraft told reporters last Monday. “He came to us as a rookie, he quarterbacked his rookie season and did a very fine job, I thought. We made the playoffs. I think we experimented with some things last year that frankly didn’t work when it came to him, in my opinion, and I think we made changes (this offseason) that I think put him in a good position to excel.”

The Patriots elected not to re-sign Meyers, Agholor and Harris this offseason, they released backup quarterback Brian Hoyer, and offensive tackle Isaiah Wynn remains available as a free agent. Meyers made some comments after that Bears game, when Jones started despite still recovering from a high-ankle sprain before being pulled for Zappe, that could be read as being critical of the team. He also told Mike Giardi, then of NFL Media, early in the season, "I question what the plan is sometimes and how we're going to attack.” Harris retweeted some criticism about the “Patriot Way” before being signed away by the Buffalo Bills. NBC Sports Boston’s Tom Curran heavily implied last week that Hoyer was cut because he voiced his displeasure about the offense last season. Wynn tweeted that he was “Free 🧘🏾” after free agency began.

https://atozsports.com/new-england/patriots-in-middle-of-mac-jones-bill-belichick-drama-signs-elsewhere/

It’s not exactly surprising that the Patriots are cutting free some offensive players who weren’t happy with how things went last season. That’s why the report that New England was “shopping” or at least gauging the value of Jones in conversations with teams wasn’t overly surprising either. At the same time, it’s not great that Judge is sticking around in a reported assistant head coach role and that Patricia’s standing on the team is still up in the air, according to Belichick. The offense was bad last season. The coaching was bad. The players were bad. Sure, Judge and Patricia lost their roles on offense, but if they’re being kept around any capacity then it looks like Belichick is siding with coaches and not players.

Barring something unforeseen, Jones will still be in New England in September. The offseason will dictate whether Jones, Zappe or an unknown third candidate will start in Week 1. If it’s Jones, he needs to have a big season. The Patriots must decide after this year if they’re going to pick up his fifth-year option. If they don’t, and if there’s already been trade talks this offseason, then those could intensify after the season. How Jones performs under O’Brien could dictate whether or not he’s going to continue to start in the NFL.