I watched him closely in college, and Mac was an outstanding college QB. Great footwork, excellent command of the offense and knew it in and out (and literally helped teach it to BOB, as BOB himself said), great accuracy, and he played near mistake-free football. His strength (and arguably his weakness, at least for some systems) is that he never deviated from the script, he did exactly what his coaches told him too, he hardly ever improvised or tried to make "something out of nothing" (he has actually improvised and scrambled much more with the Pats, for good and for ill). His coaches at Alabama were good enough to play to his strengths, they scripted out exactly what they wanted him to do and it perfectly played to his strengths, and he had a record breaking season (not to mention a National Championship).
I'm not surprised he has struggled with a rookie OC who mostly coached defense in the past this year, he is the type of QB that needs top coaching.
What has surprised me is all of his mistakes (after playing such mistake-free football at Alabama), I can only assume he is taking more risks because that is what is coaches are telling him to do. And I'm also very surprised (and disappointed) at the temper tantrums this year, after his freshman year at Alabama (where he had a bit of problems with his temper and getting frustrated with himself) I thought he had completely put that behind him, he was professionally very mature as a starter at Alabama. Hopefully with another year and some better coaching he will take a big jump next year, I still think that he fits the Patriots system to a "t".
His temperament is certainly different this year compared to year one. Although I have noticed a couple of flare-ups as I've been going back through and looking at last season. He had a couple of moments where he waved his arms at McDaniels after McDaniels called a timeout, which I hadn't picked up on but obviously noticed it more after this season.
After thinking about it a fair amount the last few weeks during this entire mess of a season, I've resigned myself to the fact that this whole situation is going to be difficult as they start trying to get the position figured out. You're basically stuck in a minimum of 3-year cycles with each of these guys while you figure out if they're good enough to do what you need, and this year we learned nothing because everything has been such a mess.
But the fact remains, we don't have elite anymore. We're going to probably have to settle for someone who is average to good and can perform well enough for them to score points and not turn the ball over. Last season, that was the case. This season, it hasn't been. I think most of us know that if you divide it out, more than half of the blame falls on the coaching and their personnel deficiencies, while Jones shoulders the rest.
What we've learned is that Jones isn't good enough - at least not yet - to overcome bad coaching, which I didn't think would be the case at the start of the season. I thought with his intelligence, he'd be able to help mask any of Patricia's shortcomings, which clearly isn't true. Which I guess, at the end of the day, is to be expected for a 2nd-year player still learning how to deal with NFL defenses.
However, I agree with you on the fact that I feel like he's salvageable enough to play in this league. Again, this is a bad season to use as a benchmark, other than it's a glimpse into how he handles things when times get difficult, which isn't ideal. Maybe he'll figure it out and grow into a better player and maybe he won't, but history has shown it does take time and they will keep drafting people to cover themselves. We saw that this season and I'm sure training camp in 2023 will be interesting.
Still, rather than kick each one to the curb after one bad season, I'm hoping they can at least get some continuity and build out the rest of the roster, so they at least have a better foundation to work from until they figure it out.
