Bill Belichick The last time The Hoodie was entrusted with handling a rookie franchise quarterback, he broke the poor kid into a thousand tiny pieces.
Here are two QB1 stat lines, four years apart:
• Signal-caller A: 29 passing TDs, 12 interceptions, 93.3 passer rating and a 10-7 record as a first-year starter
• Signal-caller B: 22 passing TDs, 13 picks, 92.5 passer rating and a 10-7 record as a first-year starter.
QB “A?” Nix as a rookie in 2025. QB “B?” Mac Jones’ debut NFL campaign in ’21 under Belichick.
So before you get all misty-eyed about the notion of Sean Payton subletting the Broncos’ head-coaching job for a few years so that The Hoodie could pad his career stats, take a deep breath. Then ask Jones about what playing QB in the 2020s under Belichick, a 70-something Belichick coaching on fumes, felt like for a young quarterback trying to find his feet.
“So, at first, Bill was going to call the (offensive) plays,” when asked about 2022, Mac’s second season under Belichick. “Which, I was like, ‘All right, this is kind of fun. Let’s see how this goes.'”
It went south. Our old pal Josh McDaniels had been Jones’ personal QB whisperer during the latter’s rookie season in 2021. Only when McDaniels parlayed that into a head-coaching gig with the Raiders before the ’22 season, the wheels came off. Belichick divided offensive coordinator duties between longtime assistant Matt Particia, who’d primarily been a defensive coach, and Joe Judge, who was working with New England’s special teams.
The Pats slipped from sixth in the league in points scored in 2021 to 17th in ’22. Jones shattered, the way this league can crush a QB if the fates are unkind. Mac still hasn’t quite put everything back together again, even after a rookie season that was eerily close to Nix’s numbers in 2024.
“I think that really affected me,” Jones continued. “I felt like, if I could have just built on the year before, it would’ve really helped me and everybody on the team …
“We didn’t know who we were going to hire. And I was a little worried about that … you could kind of see it trending, and I was just a second-year player, so I didn’t really say much, or do much. But Brian Hoyer was the backup, and he was kind of like, looking at me, trying to keep me in it. But we were kind of like, ‘This is not going to be good.'”
It wasn’t. It wouldn’t have been any good in Denver, either.
We mention this because the other big Belichick news of the past week had a distinctly Denver flair. ESPN.com scribe onto the interwebs a few days back. Only there were massive swaths of the tome that left you saying to yourself, ‘What the expletive was Payton thinking?’
Sunshine Sean is a living, breathing NFL savant. Wickersham’s dive was a cinematic stroll through a beautiful, if sometimes twisted, football mind. But this little passage was just …weird:
“Payton and (Bill) Belichick go back decades, forged by mutual respect — and mutual trauma from working under (Bill) Parcells. When Belichick and the Patriots divorced in 2024, Payton considered presenting Broncos owner Greg Penner a proposal for the ages: Hire Belichick as head coach until he reached 15 wins, enough to break Don Shula’s career record of 347. Payton would temporarily step down to assistant head coach and run the offense, then move back after Belichick became the all-time leader. In the end, it was too complicated — and maybe too fanciful.”
That’s not genius.
It’s madness.
Payton’s affection for the Hoodie isn’t just real — it goes back decades. When Sunshine Sean was hired in New Orleans, he dug into what made Belichick’s Patriots so dominant.
“We spent a great deal of time looking at New England,” Payton told NOLA.com in 2021.
“(Belichick has) always been someone who’s been a bit of a mentor, someone that I feel I have a good relationship with. That started, really, with the respect factor and what he’s been able to accomplish … to have the staying power that he’s had is obviously remarkable.”
Fine. Whatever. Still loco. Too many alphas. Too small a space. Even if Payton’s turtoring/shielding his QBs as some sort of “deputy coach/offense,” when the buck stops at Wild Bill’s desk, nobody is ever truly safe. Also, the screens. So, so, so, soooooo many screens.
Payton began 2026 as the No. 3-highest-paid coach in U.S. sports, with a reported average salary of $18 million per year — only the Chiefs’ Andy Reid and the Giants’ John Harbaugh bettered him, at $20 million apiece. (When Sportico ranked the top-50 coach salaries in the country, CU’s Deion Sanders ($10.8 million) checked in at No. 34, while Belichick’s $10 million from North Carolina landed him at No. 37.)
It wouldn’t be fair to the Penners, who invested in Payton for him to reset the culture and make it his own.
It wouldn’t be fair to the players, who signed up for one Super Bowl winner, only to get baited-and-switched for another.
It wouldn’t be fair to the league’s record book. Or to the legacy of Don Shula.
It wouldn’t be fair to apountry, who grew to detest Belichick and his Pats as a cheating rival for decades — a feeling that bubbled into hate after he foisted his chum McDaniels upon our fair populace.
And it wouldn’t be fair to Nix, who became the quarterback, after almost a decade of false hope and false starts, to lead a proud franchise out of the wilderness.
“(Bill) took (the offense) over, and we kind of didn’t know where we were going,” the former Pats QB told the ‘Bussin” crew. “There (were) three people in the meeting — who stands up to talk to the offense? They didn’t really know.”
Some scenes are best left on the cutting room floor, some things better left unsaid. the Broncos don’t have to worry about keeping up with the Joneses anymore. Mac or otherwise.
