Latest news: Kendrick Bourne and the Patriots came to an agreement on a three-year deal with a max value of $33 million
Per a league source, the deal was low on guaranteed money and heavy on incentives. That's to be expected for a player coming ACL surgery.
We'll have to see if the Patriots still intend to hit the WR free-agent market hard, where Calvin Ridley is clearly the best player available. The Patriots could just use the draft to improve the WR room.
Will the Patriots reach a similar agreement with Mike Onwenu before Noon? Or are they content to let him ride off into free agency and recoup a compensatory pick?
______________________
The Mac Jones era (error?) is over. The Patriots are turning the 15th overall pick in the 2021 NFL draft into a reported late-round selection in 2024 (deal still being finalized), swapping the much-maligned quarterback to the Jacksonville Jaguars. It's a homecoming for Jones, who was born in Jacksonville.
Despite reports of multiple suitors, per source, the Jaguars were the only team to put an offer on the table. Jones' stock plummeted after a rookie season in which he was the best of the five first-round signal callers, including top pick (and now teammate) Trevor Lawrence. Under the watchful eye of then-offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels, the former Alabama product threw for 38 hundred yards and 22 touchdowns and was arguably the Pats' best player in that lopsided playoff loss in Buffalo.
But when McDaniels took the Raiders head coaching job, Bill Belichick turned the offense over to noted strategists Matt Patricia and Joe Judge (tongue firmly in cheek). That training camp was an absolute debacle. Despite hiring Bill O'Brien to fix the mess in 2023, Jones never recovered, was benched multiple times for backup Bailey Zappe, and also lost the locker room. The cherry on top of this crap sundae was Belichick making Jones the emergency quarterback in the season finale, a loss to the Jets. Per sources, the 25-year-old didn't know that was how what turned out to be his last game with New England would go until he showed up at Gillette Stadium that morning.
Four days later, Belichick's 24-year tenure with the Pats ended with a "mutual parting," and one of the new staff's first orders of business — headed by Eliot Wolf and Jerod Mayo — was to move on from Jones. Now that's happened, and Doug Pederson will try to rehabilitate Jones, who is in the final year of his rookie deal (it is not expected that the Jags will pick up his fifth-year option).
The last time we heard from Jones publicly was the day after the season ended. He spoke cordially with reporters for around 10 minutes, several times looking back on his rocky journey (24 TDs, 23 INTs in his final two seasons).
"I always take notes, and I've gotten a chance to go back and look at my notes from the past three years. And there are a lot of things I can do better, and there are a lot of things that are in my control, but there's also a lot of things that are out of my control," he noted. "I've always said that I'm gonna focus on the controllables, and that's important to me. But like I said earlier, I feel like I've made progress, especially in the last couple of weeks. I've been here early, left late. A lot of people would have just said, 'I'm done", and I'm not going to do that... "So that's where I'm at right now, and that's why I'm looking forward to the next opportunity. I know it's gonna come, but at the end of the day, as a quarterback and a competitor, you got to be ready, right? So I'm going to be ready."
Hopefully, lessons were learned on both sides. The organization failed their young QB, and their young QB showed some immaturity that he could never recover from. The Pats can't afford to do that with who's next, or this downward cycle will continue far longer than those at One Patriot Place are comfortable with.