Reading between the lines on staff
The Patriots finally announced their 2023 coaching staff titles Thursday. A few takeaways:
■ Jerod Mayo is listed only as “linebacker coach.” He didn’t get a title increase despite the new contract he signed in January that kept him off the head coaching market, likely resulted in a big raise and potentially set him up as the coach-in-waiting in New England. Mayo probably doesn’t care about the title as long as he has the right paycheck and career path. He also probably doesn’t want to create any extra tension with defensive play-caller Steve Belichick.
■ Joe Judge is listed as an assistant head coach, and is grouped with the defensive coaches. Last year, he was Mac Jones’s quarterbacks coach. Now it appears the team is putting Judge on the other side of the ball, as far away from Jones as possible.
■ Cameron Achord is still listed as special teams coordinator, and Judge doesn’t have special teams anywhere in his title, even though Judge clearly was running special teams during spring practices. The Patriots need Judge to fix last year’s unit, which allowed three kickoff return touchdowns and ranked 32nd in several punting categories.
■ The new assistant quarterbacks coach is an interesting one: Evan Rothstein, who has spent most of his 12 years in the NFL in charge of analysis and special projects. Rothstein, who didn’t play college football, is perhaps best known as the number-cruncher who was thrust into the role of Lions defensive coordinator against Tom Brady in a 2020 game affected by a COVID19 outbreak.
“He has his meetings each week when we talk about tendencies, signals, cadences, just all the little nuances of the game that a lot of people might overlook,” former Lions safety Duron Harmon said in 2020.
Rothstein spent nine years with the Lions, where he was the team’s lead researcher and analyst and, eventually, Matt Patricia’s right-hand man. He came to New England with Patricia in 2021 in a research and analysis/coaching role, and was an offensive assistant in 2022.