Arguably the GOAT coach was just fired and replaced by a neophyte implementing polar opposite team culture philosophy. You don't consider that worth discussing? This is a message board for football fans, after all.
"Arguably the GOAT coach was just fired"
Yes, no question that he is the GOAT. So he had more latitude than any other coach would have had. He had four major screw-ups.
1. He messed up the succession from the GOAT quarterback. Whatever the background story is and whoever was responsible, relations with Brady soured and yet Belichick did not have a plan in place to replace him when he left.
2. He splurged in free agency and got very poor value, at the same time pushing the team so tightly against the cap again that their freedom of action was badly compromised.
3. He messed up the departure of Josh McDaniels. Of course, coaches leave to be head coaches, but Belichick let McDaniels take pretty much all of the offensive staff with him. Instead, he installed Judge and Patricia as key offensive coaches and the results were terrible -- not just in terms of losses, but in destroying the development of what had looked to be a promising young quarterback.
4. When he brought in professional offensive coaches (O'Brien, Klemm) things got even worse. There seems to have been some kind of a purge of the disaffected during the Judge/Patricia experiment (Hoyer, Meyers, Wynn) and the newly-acquired players were a big drop-off (Elliott, Smith-Schuster). Not only was Belichick restricting who he drafted to players he felt he could get along with (not an unreasonable thing to do) but he was falling out with too many of those he did bring in (Jack Jones).
So it was time for a change, even if Belichick didn't know it.
"and replaced by a neophyte implementing polar opposite team culture philosophy"
The team had three kinds of option, I think.
1. It's striking that pretty much everyone off the Belichick coaching tree who moved on to be a head coach (Mangini, Crennel, Judge, Patricia, McDaniels) got fired. Maybe Flores was unfairly canned and O'Brien had some success before he was let go. But it's not a good record and it shows that what worked once for Belichick didn't seem to work for others. Should the Patriots have tried what failed in New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Denver, etc., etc. and appointed a Belichick Mini-Me?
2. They could have cleaned things out completely and gone for a coach with a quite different background and approach. The only one around who looked promising like that was Harbaugh. Not an easy man to work with or play for, by all accounts. It would have been a big gamble.
3. So they opted for a kind of mixed continuity-discontinuity approach. I have no idea whether Mayo has the strength of character to make that work. Maybe it's too milk-and-cookies to succeed in the NFL. I don't know. Just as I don't know if Drake Maye has it to be an NFL franchise quarterback.
But it's not a stupid choice and I'll back the team while we find out.