TRANSCRIPT: Ian Rapoport on Felger & Massarotti Interview – Maye was ‘for sure rooting for’ McDaniels
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The NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport sat down with Michael Felger and Tony Massarotti on 98.5 The Sports Hub as well as Jim Murray Wednesday and offered some insight into the upcoming New England Patriots season. Here’s the full transcript of that interview:
MF: We got Ian Rappaport of the NFL Network joining us here from the Raising Canes Guest chair here from Radio Row.
“What up, guys?”
MF: How are you doing?
“I’m good.
MF: What’s going on?
“How are things?”
TM: Long time, no see.
MF: Can’t complain. Former Boston guy. Give us some Patriots dirt.
“Patriots dirt. Things have settled, man.”
MF: No, no, no. Come on.
“The wealth of knowledge that I have that you don’t know, you don’t have time for.”
MF: We’ll make time.
“My biggest problem is that these things always mess up my hair. [referring to the radio headset]”
TS: Me, too. (Laughs)
MF: Do you think there’s anything to see here with the staffing on the team? If you look at Mike Vrabel and Josh McDaniels, I feel it’s a little bit of an arranged marriage. Mike Vrabel had West Coast, Shanahan, McVay guys in Tennessee.
“Probably right.”
MF: When you look at the assistants that they’ve hired in New England, a lot of them are Shanahan and McVay guys. Yet the offensive coordinator is Josh McDaniels, who’s obviously closely aligned with the Krafts. Sure. Also still getting paid by the Raiders, so maybe comes at a nice number for New England?
“I’m sure he does.”
MF: Right. I look at that and go, ‘Kind of an arranged marriage here.’
“I mean, maybe an arranged marriage, yes. But I do believe that Mike Vrabel had autonomy over the staff. I imagine if he did not want Josh McDaniels, that he would not have him, right? You’re right. It’s a little bit of a mix of systems.”
“I am okay with that because Josh has obviously bounced around. He was in Las Vegas. Some different viewpoints there, some different guys on his staff maybe kind of help him modernize, I guess you would say. Guys like Scott Turner, for instance, come from that tree. So the most important thing to me, if you were a head coach and you were like, ‘I want to hire the most successful and best offensive coordinator I could find,’ Josh McDaniels would be on the list. He’d be very, very high on the list. I don’t think he was going, honestly, anywhere except New England. People kept asking me, ‘I hear rumors of maybe he’s going to join Bill in North Carolina.’ I don’t think he was moving out of New England. So it was either this or bust. And I think it’s a good hire. If you are Drake Maye, and I know Drake Maye was for sure rooting for this. You’re Drake Maye, you’d like to be a very good quarterback. Having the guy who helped Tom Brady, become a very good quarterback, you could do worse.”
TM: When you say Drake May was rooting for this, I would love to hear more. When rooting for it relative to what?
“To anything else.”
TM: Including what he had?
“Yeah. I think given the situation last year with the offensive line, with the lack of weapons all around, the team was bad. I would say it was even actually worse than I probably realized at the time in October, November, me just as an outside observer, it was even worse than… You guys probably had a better sense than I did. The last couple of games happened, and I was like, ‘wow,’ the second… I’m like, ‘They’re bad. They’re just bad. Just bad.’ Alex Van Pelt, I think did some good things, did some good teaching. I think there were some things to like there. And Drake Maye, if you isolate his performance from the very, very bad team around him, I thought played pretty well. Josh is one of the best there is. Yeah, I mean, this is, to me, from a professional standpoint, this is absolutely what Drake Maye was rooting for. I know when it all got announced, he was extremely excited, as he should be. I think it’s very, very positive.”
MF: Ian Rappaport NFL Network. You’ve spent some time in Boston and around the Patriots. Are you surprised it’s gotten this bad? What happened? How did we get here?
“Well, we got here in the way that you always get here. Really, they were sort of there at the end of Belichick’s tenure, too. It’s just he’s a very, very, very good coach. For years, he could mask a lot of the lack of talent. We’ve seen it. There were plenty of Patriots teams where you’d be like, ‘These guys aren’t good. They’re not.’ Then they would just be okay, be okay, win a playoff game, win a playoff game, go to the Super Bowl and win it. You’re like, ‘But this team isn’t good, right?’
MF: Yeah, there’s a couple of those.
“A couple of those. That’s what they felt like, except by the end, the last couple of years of Bill’s staff wasn’t great, it was a mess all around. They stopped being able to coach their way out of lack of talents. Past drafts have not been great. Free Agency has not been great. You have bad drafts and you have not great free agency, and you’re not the best coached team in the NFL, you suck. I think they were bad. I think it’s the hardest thing in the world to look at your team and be like, from a completely neutral standpoint, no bias, ‘We are bad, and we need a couple of years to get better.’ I think they thought that before the Mayo regime, and then it was still bad. I think they’re in a better place this year. I think for agency, it’ll be interesting to see how they solidify things.”
TM: Just so I don’t put words in your mouth, can we agree that Mayo was not ready for the challenge?
“Yeah. It’s annoying, actually. I’m sort of where Robert Kraft is, which is he’s a really good leader. The raw materials to be a good coach are there. I don’t know if he’s going to coach again. I mean, he has plenty of money. He could go be in the venture capital world, do some investments, have a great life. I have no idea. But I’m a little frustrated personally because I would have liked to see whether everything I thought and everything the Krafts thought would manifest itself.”
“He was not ready. They didn’t have a Doug Marrone on the staff or someone like that to be like, ‘Hey, I’ve been here before. Let me help you through these missteps that can happen when you’re a first-time head coach. Let me help you through these press conferences where you say one thing and then something else happens.’ And everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, okay. It’s just the media.’ But messaging is important. You know how much Belichick cared about press conferences? He was delivering a message to his team all the time, and it wasn’t like that. I don’t think he got enough help. I think the team was bad. I don’t think the coaching staff was good enough. He wasn’t ready.”
“Again, for me, it probably took me through the middle of December to realize – because each time they’d play team close or they’d win a game, you’re like, ‘Okay, I see this…’ By the end, it was like, Unfortunately, it’s time.”
MF: Ian Rapoport, NFL Network joining us here. Are the Chiefs good or bad for football?
“Oh, they’re good. They’re good in the same way…
MF: Even though people hate them, people are sick of them, people think that it’s rigged for them?
“It’s the same with the Patriots back when they were really good. It’s like, ‘Cheaters, Brady…’ every year. ‘We’ve got to see these guys again?’ You need something to root for or against. Now, it’s funny because half the NFL, or more than half, everyone, it seemed, wanted Lions/Bills. That would have been the fun one. This place would have been absolutely crawling with Bills fans and Lions fans, and it would have been awesome. Reality is we got the best teams, for better or worse, we got the best teams. Everyone, I assume, is going to be… I don’t know. Can you root against the Chiefs when the Eagles are the other team? It’s like, if the NFC East, everyone hates the Eagles. Can you root against both of them? I don’t know. It’s interesting how it happened.
TM: Like Murray.
JM: It’s a bit of a pickle. I can’t stand either.
“Seriously.”
MF: Hope for another blackout.
“God, I’ll never forget that one. Let’s hope against that.”
JM: Is that the reason this game hasn’t been here?
MF: Yeah, why aren’t we back here more often?
“I would like to come here all the time because I like the food a lot. I think they ended up spending $400 million refurbishing the stadium.”
TM: I was just saying, because the stadium sucked.
“Not sucked. Like, almost couldn’t be used.”
TM: So beyond that is what you’re saying.
“It’s not like while the locker rooms were a little small.”
MF: Did they even have a luxury box? Was it built with luxury boxes?
“I don’t think so.”
MF: I think it was built in an era before.
TM: Yeah, I think you’re right.
MF: They were built with luxury boxes in mind.
TM: It was like playing in a dungeon.
“Well, I mean, not that you want all these details, but I used the bathroom when I was there for media day. There’s still a trough.”
MF: Trough?
“Yeah. I was texting someone, I was like, ‘How I spelled this. I haven’t spelled this in a while.’ There’s still some old-school touches.”
TM: O-u-g-h.
“That’s what I thought.”
TM: T-r-o-u-g-h.
“Yeah, that’s how I spelled it. Nailed it.”
TM: Was this place built in the ’70s?
MF: I think so.
TM: Holy Crap.
“Holy crap. It’s also the coldest place on Earth. Bring a jacket.”
MF: Inside.
“If you’re staying.”
MF: Okay. Final question. Any of these, Reid/Belichick, Mahomes/Brady, Chiefs/Patriots, Kelce/Gronkowski, you give the Chiefs the checkmark on any of them?
“Oh, that is a good question. Thank you. The problem with Gronk… I mean, Kelce is probably more productive. Gornk was so good in every facet of the game. I think I might give the Patriots the check on all of them. Now, two teams in their prime, if you rewound a little bit, I would like to see that because Mahomes and Brady have the same thing where if he gets the ball last, you know what’s going to happen. I don’t bet, obviously, considering where I work. But if you did, you’d bet everything. Mahomes is going to get it done. Whereas Josh Allen is certainly not there yet, and plenty of other quarterbacks are not. I think Mahomes and Brady have the same sort of thing where you know they’re going to win. I would have liked to see that matchup, but alas.”
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