The following first appeared on 985thesportshub.com on Friday, Jan. 12, after former Patriots linebacker Jerod Mayo was hired as the team’s new head coach.
The first time I met Jerod Mayo, he poked fun at my stentorian cadence behind a microphone in the middle of a high school field. True, before Hardy on 98.5, I was mimicked by Jerod, from Hampton Roads.
We were in Newtown, Conn. for a day-long event centered around a youth football clinic conducted by Patriots players and assistant coaches in the spring of 2013. As emcee, it was my first ‘official’ role as the team’s newly-hired broadcaster.
Drills concluded, and I introduced Mayo for a few words to the kids and their families seated all around us. Naturally, as always with him, a captain since his second season, he connected with the crowd. First, though, he hit yours truly with a playful jab, making note (and light) of my ‘announcer’s voice.’ Naturally, as always with Mayo, he did it smiling in a way that let me know: he was just busting my chops to break the ice.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to lend my voice to enough of his games. A torn pectoral muscle in the season’s sixth week – overshadowed by Tom Brady to Kenbrell Thompkins to beat the Saints – robbed Mayo of most of 2013. Further injury robbed him of most of the next year, too.
Rather than “wallow in (his) pain,” as Mayo told Gautam Mukunda on the NASDAQ World Reimagined podcast in March 2021 (the listen is well worth your time), he worked to help the team win. Mayo dived into film study with Steve Belichick, then a coaching assistant, and involved himself on the sidelines during games. Long a ‘coach on the field’ as an inside linebacker making defensive calls, he was a de facto ‘player-coach’ for an eventual Super Bowl champ.
We would later learn, watching the collaboration of Mayo and the young Belichick running the Pats defense in recent years, that they became very close in Jerod’s final ‘playing’ days; just as one can learn by listening to him chat with Mukunda, or by reading or watching features like TheAthletic.com or Patriots.com profiles from last year, that he simultaneously formed relationships to help him excel outside football.
A younger Mayo – he’s still very young, at 37 – probed owner Robert Kraft for insights into the business world. He sipped wine and listened intently in intellectual circles and sought mentorships that prepared him for success as an angel investor and an executive rising to vice president of business development for Optum, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Care.
Mayo also made time for television, shining in spots alongside Tom E. Curran, Phil Perry and the rest of the NBC Sports Boston crew. He easily could sit on a network set, like Tedy Bruschi or one of the McCourtys. Instead, he reclaimed a seat in the film room, becoming a coach.
No sooner than Mayo’s return to One Patriot Place, he was seen as a future head coach, here and elsewhere, as evidenced by future interview opportunities. Even before last spring’s unique statement of ownership’s intentions to work out a deal to employ him long term, it was hard to envision the Krafts watching Mayo walk out the door to take over someone else’s team.
On Thursday, Robert Kraft reminded us of something Jonathan Kraft has spoken about publicly in the past: how a relationship was formed with Bill Belichick in part over a mutual understanding of economics, the salary cap, value over cost, etcetera. They connected on a level transcending the game on the field.
If you listen to Mayo and Mukunda; or hear him in the dot-com feature describe the formative influences of his mother and grandfather; or consider the intellectual and analytical thirst for information required to succeed in funding private startups; it’s easy to understand how Mayo and the Krafts would connect on a higher plane than a grid of Xs and Os.
Then, take into account his leadership skills demonstrated as a rookie in a linebackers room populated by Bruschi and Junior Seau and Mike Vrabel. Mayo was the kid they dispatched to knock on Bill Belichick’s door to pitch their case for an occasional day off from padded practice.
“If the worst thing someone can do to you is say, ‘no,’” Mayo’s mother, Denise, told her son, “go for it.”
Most — maybe two-thirds — of the time Belichick gave him a hard ‘no.’ But when the reply was ‘yes,’ Mayo was celebrated among his mates. A year later, they voted him captain.
“The guys knew I cared about them more than I cared about myself,” he said to Mukunda of his youthful willingness to knock on that door, to go for it.
Sixteen-years later, the same feeling is consistent among the players Mayo’s coached. Mark Daniels of Masslive.com is one of many reporters who’ve written their testimonials in recent days.
No doubt, concerns, questions, criticism, all come with this hire. Not unlike the one Robert Kraft made in January of 2000.
After all, Mayo’s never been a ‘coordinator,’ let alone a head coach. Absolutely, Vrabel is available, and we know all too well how good he is from the games he’s coached against the Patriots (see 2018, at Nashville, or, worse, January of 2020, in Foxborough).
You’re right, Jerod’s a defensive coach, hired as the organization closes in on a crossroads draft in need of identifying and developing its future quarterback. Okay, you consider him a disciple of Bill’s, asking, understandably: ‘Why move on from the best coach ever to then turn to one of his own?’ And how about: ‘Will he go outside current or past Pats circles for coaches? Can he? Who will take over player personnel?’
All valid. And all, I trust, the Krafts considered.
“Jerod is an individual that, I think, has no ceiling for his ability to grow and how competent he is,” Robert Kraft said at last spring’s owners meetings. “We had the privilege of having him as a player, and I saw how intense he was, and his leadership skills that he had. And then I saw him leave us and go into private industry and learn the Xs and Os of business, and then come back to be a coach and do that with us.”
Of course, Mayo confronts an enormous learning curve. And faces major challenges trying to lead the Pats from 4-13, a third losing season in four years, back to expectations as a perennial Super Bowl contender.
Even if you consider Mayo’s time making checks at the line of scrimmage and leading in the locker and meeting rooms as a player as some measure of coaching equivalent, there’s no downplaying the enormity of his new undertaking; he’s still very new at this coaching thing.
But that doesn’t make him the wrong choice for this team, at this time. In Mayo, the Patriots have an exemplar of their best qualities of the past; who’s proven himself to be an out-of-box thinker and learner; who coaches, as he recently said, “out of love,” remaining “tough” while showing “warmth” and building “confidence”; who communicates and connects as a person in settings as diverse as the C-suite and team cafeteria; who has the character, intelligence and charisma to be both a constant and an agent for necessary change.
What’s more, if his past is a prelude, Mayo won’t be afraid of tackling that curve and those challenges cast in the hooded shadow hanging over the organization from the past 24 years; just as he wasn’t afraid, at 22, to knock on Bill’s door.
Speaking of Bill, Mayo described Belichick to Mukunda as “a continuous learner” always “trying to evolve.” As if talking about himself.
Mayo’s about to learn a lot on a new job, arguably, the toughest in sports, eight years after he retired from playing, prompting the legend he now succeeds to praise him at the 2016 owners meetings.
“There have been very few players in my career that I’ve had the opportunity to coach that I’d say had more of an impact on the team than Jerod has from day one, which is unusual,” Belichick said.
It’s day one of a new Patriots era, and an unusual person gets his shot to impact the team as its next head coach. I, for one, am excited to describe the days that follow – in my best announcer’s voice.
Bob Socci recently completed his 11th season as the play-by-play broadcaster for the Patriots Radio Network on 98.5 The Sports Hub in Boston.
BOB SOCCI 