Yeah, anyone who thinks they've done something intentional to make Mac look bad is going way out on a limb. I think it's actually pretty simple: Last year, it got way too easy for teams to gameplan against the Pats offense. Load the box, take away the short-intermediate stuff, make Mac consistently beat you deep. Going into this year, they wanted to show other teams that they couldn't do that anymore, so they drafted a speedster at WR, sign another WR who's known for deep contested catches, and tried to shift the offensive philosophy to look deep more often. I think the idea was to force defenses into higher shell coverages, and then you can just eat underneath all day if you have to.
Whatever the combination of factors are, in reality that plan hasn't worked. Either Mac isn't good at running it, the coaching staff isn't good at scheming/teaching it, they don't have consistent enough weapons to take advantage, or the offensive line hasn't been good enough to let deep concepts develop. Probably a little bit of all of it.
Personally, I would have tried doing it the opposite way, by starting with what you know Mac can run and then expanding it, but I think they assumed teams would be selling out on the short stuff right away, so I get it. Not too late to go back and try to build from short to long again, but clock's ticking for sure.