No back-and-forth
It’s important for Belichick to pick a quarterback and stick with him
Bill Belichick used a pre-planned rotation at quarterback in Monday night’s loss to the Bears, but he isn’t going to make that same mistake.
This week, word got out by Wednesday afternoon that Mac Jones was in his regular starting role at practice. By Thursday, Belichick made public what he told Jones and Bailey Zappe privately — that Jones would start Sunday against the Jets, and prepare for a full game.
“I talked to all the quarterbacks, so everybody knows where we’re at,” Belichick said.
It seems Belichick relearned a valuable lesson in the loss to Chicago — you can’t have two quarterbacks.
“You don’t see teams with co-head coaches,” said former Colts and Buccaneers coach Tony Dungy, now with NBC. “It’s the same thing with the quarterback. I think it’s really important to say, ‘Hey, we’re riding with this guy, he’s our leader.’ As a head coach, no matter what happens, you want everybody to know who your guy is.”
Belichick appeared to try to thread a delicate needle last week, knowing Jones wasn’t fully healthy but wanting to give him a chance to reestablish himself after missing three games with an ankle injury. Jones got the start, but Belichick got Zappe ready to play, too, in case Jones’s ankle couldn’t hold up.
The plan backfired spectacularly. After two punts and an interception led to a 10-0 deficit, Belichick pulled Jones for Zappe. Jones was booed by the home crowd and embarrassed on national TV. Zappe had to play three-quarters of a game without getting the proper reps during the week. The Patriots lost a winnable game and were left with a mess at quarterback that Belichick had to clean during the week.
“What’s the line in ‘Sweet Home Alabama’? ‘You can’t ride two horses with one [butt]?’ ” said CBS analyst Charles Davis, who is calling Sunday’s Patriots-Jets game. “It’s just hard to make it work. Your team dynamics get really thrown off.”
It was a surprising plan, because Belichick experienced firsthand the importance of choosing a quarterback and sticking with him. According to David Halberstam’s book, “The Education of a Coach,” Belichick split practice reps between Tom Brady and Drew Bledsoe before a 2001 regular-season loss to the Rams. Belichick “thought that having the quarterbacks share the practice snaps had affected the team negatively and had probably caused Brady to fall a little out of his rhythm . . . He called Bledsoe in and told him that they could not go on sharing snaps, that the practice snaps had to go to the starting quarterback, and right now that was Tom Brady.”
And according to Ian O’Connor’s book “Belichick,” the coach knew he had to make a decision after that Rams game. “There was friction in the locker room,” one Patriots starter said in the book. “And it was amplified times a thousand when Drew got healthy. You wouldn’t believe how much tension was in that locker room.”
The football cliché — when you have two quarterbacks, you really have none — is an over-simplification. Tom Landry rotated quarterbacks on almost every play in the early 1960s, to great success. The Dolphins won a Super Bowl behind Bob Griese and Earl Morrall, and reached another Super Bowl with Don Strock coming out of the bullpen for David Woodley each game. More recently, the Saints kept defenses on their toes by bringing in Taysom Hill to occasionally spell Drew Brees in short-yardage and red-zone situations.
But in today’s NFL, the two-QB system probably only works if the quarterbacks have distinct skill sets, as the Saints had with Brees and Hill. In the Patriots’ situation, Jones and Zappe are similar players. Jones is a little more wiry at 6 feet 3 inches and 217 pounds, while Zappe is a bit undersized but more solidly built at 6-1, 220. Neither has above-average physical traits and need to rely on their accuracy and decisionmaking.
“I’ve seen people pull it off, but it’s rare,” Davis said. “And most of the time it’s, ‘This guy’s my runner, and this guy’s my passer.’ Bottom line is it’s not a recipe for success.”
Zappe’s stats are much better so far, but this week, Belichick made clear that Jones, last year’s first-round pick, is going to be his quarterback.
And it will be important for Belichick to stick with Jones for the long term and not make every week a competition for the job.
“Ping-ponging at quarterback is not good,” Dungy said. “I learned from Denny Green, if you ever make a quarterback switch, you have to know that the guy you’re going to is your guy, because going back doesn’t make sense.”
In 1992, Dungy was the Vikings’ defensive coordinator when Green made a midseason quarterback switch.
“We’re 7-2, first play, he calls me into the office, ‘I want you to be ready, we’re going to make a switch,’ and he benched Rich Gannon and put Sean Salisbury in the lineup,” Dungy said. “And it wasn’t, ‘I’m going to try Sean out and see what happens.’ No, it was, ‘Sean’s going to be the guy for the rest of the year.’ Denny learned from Bill Walsh and believed that you just have one guy.”
If Belichick doesn’t stick with Jones moving forward, he’s inviting a leadership void in the locker room and possibly creating controversy where it isn’t needed.
“I hate to call it a divided locker room, but people do respond to quarterbacks differently,” Davis said. “Teams like to know who they should be following, and if you’ve got two, and neither of them are giving you what you’re looking for, you almost get a vacuum in there. Who am I following? What am I doing? It’s one of those weird dynamics, and I’d be surprised if Coach Belichick goes too long with this idea that both would play.”