Josh McDaniels: ‘No concern’ of rookie wall for Patriots QB Mac Jones

Could Mac Jones be hitting a rookie wall? It’s fair to wonder as the Patriots quarterback ventures into uncharted territory.

Jones excelled during the team’s seven-game winning streak going into the bye week, though he didn’t have much of an impact on their Week 13 win over the Bills. But he’s certainly regressed over his last two games — the 14th and 15th games of his career. In the two losses since the bye, the quarterback’s numbers have dipped: two touchdowns to four interceptions and a 51.9 completion percentage, after throwing just two picks and posting a 63.9 completion mark over the winning streak.

In three years at Alabama, Mac Jones never played more than 13 games. But though the quarterback has never experienced a season this long and taxing, offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels isn’t buying the notion that he’s hit a wall. To him, that would have happened a long time ago.

“He’s doing fine,” McDaniels said Tuesday. “No concern on that. Each rookie kind of handles that differently. There’s always a stretch during the course of the middle of the season that’s a little bit new to him, because when you count the preseason games, preseason work, starting in July, usually that happens somewhere towards the end of October, middle of November, somewhere in there. But he’s gotten through that. He understands what he needs to do. He does a great job with his regimen, takes care of his body, his preparation. He’s learned how to manage his time and what he needs to allocate it towards, and I think that’s a really important thing for a young player.”

McDaniels agreed that there areas Jones obviously needs improvement in after he went 14-for-32 — the lowest completion percentage (43.8%) of his young career — for just 145 yards and two interceptions in Sunday’s loss to the Bills. But he didn’t pin it all on the rookie, noting that a successful passing game is a product of the unit, not just quarterback play.

“Every positive pass play requires a lot of good things to be done, and so when you look at a singular event like Sunday’s game, there are definitely a handful of things that I think that we could have done better at the quarterback position,” McDaniels said. “There were things where the protection wasn’t as good as we needed it to be and there were times when maybe we didn’t either read the coverage properly or get open with enough separation for us to be able to throw and catch the ball with the skill group.

“It’s always a team thing. I know everybody’s going to point to the quarterback’s statistics and say, ‘Oh, he had a subpar day.’ There’s definitely things that the quarterback can do better and will do better, but the passing game is a function of a lot of people doing their job well, and there’s no shortcut to that. We miss a blitz pickup and the quarterback throws the ball away, it’s an incomplete pass and he did the right thing. So, there’s a few situations like that that have come up.”

Sunday’s game against a struggling Jaguars team, on the surface, looks like a bounce-back opportunity for Jones and the passing game. But McDaniels said it won’t be that easy against a group led by defensive coordinator Joe Cullen, who he said will throw multiple looks at Jones.

“The Jacksonville defense will play as many different schemes as we’ve probably seen all year,” McDaniels said. “Coach Cullen comes from the Baltimore family and it’s a big challenge in terms of reading it all out, being on the same page, blocking, all the different things that they do in the pressure game. This team pressures more than anybody else we’ve seen, and they’ll come from everywhere. The secondary, the linebackers, the sideline, we have to be head on a swivel. Again, the passing game execution this week will be much the same as we need it to be every week. We have to do a good job across the board in protection, reading the routes the right way, running good routes, throwing accurately, making good reads and then finishing the play with the ball.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3eCtd0x