Culture

Forty years later, Penguins feel Mario Lemieux's impact every day

Published

7 months ago

June 18, 2024

Forty years later, Penguins feel Mario Lemieux's impact every day

Eddie Johnston, the general manager who drafted Mario Lemieux 40 years ago this month, had only one concern when he announced the historic selection at the old Montreal Forum — and it wasn’t whether Lemieux would pull a Penguins jersey over his head.

Lemieux did not.

Ironically, Lemieux’s first act with the Penguins was to somewhat distance himself from a franchise he would spend the next four decades personifying, influencing and owning on and off the ice.

“That was his agents, not Mario — he didn’t want to do it,” Johnston said. “Mario and I never talked about it. Not that day. Not to this day.

“I’d done my homework. Now, you hear about generational prospects. No, Mario wasn’t generational. He was once in a lifetime, and not just as a player — as a person.

“We (the Penguins) aren’t here without Mario.”

GO DEEPER

NHL 99: Mario Lemieux could ‘do things that nobody else could do’

Perhaps you’ve heard something similar before. For those unfamiliar, consider the circumstances in Pittsburgh preceding Lemieux’s arrival in 1984:

The Penguins were nine years removed from bankruptcy.
They averaged fewer than 8,500 fans during the 1982-83 season when they finished with only 45 points and a minus-137 goal differential despite a sixth-best 81 power-play goals.
They practiced at a suburban high school rink, then one of only a few around Pittsburgh.
They had never made it past two rounds of a postseason and were most known for two crushing playoff losses to the New York Islanders — a blown 3-0 series lead in 1975 and a 3-1 third-period lead in an overtime loss in a decisive Game 5 in 1982.
Their owner, Edward DeBartolo, Sr., favored selling the franchise to support the more successful, and popular at the time, Pittsburgh Spirit, an indoor soccer team that also played at Civic Arena.

“When I played for the Oilers, we loved coming to Pittsburgh,” Paul Coffey said. “It was a great sports town. There were Steelers shirts and Pirates hats everywhere. All the same colors, that black and gold. We’d play the Penguins, and the games weren’t very competitive, to be honest, and I’d tell the guys after the game when we were having a few pops, ‘Man, if they ever figure out the hockey thing here, this will be a destination.’

“Well, they figured it out. The answer was Mario. I don’t think any player in our game has meant more to a city or franchise.”

That is a big statement, though it comes from a past teammate of Lemieux, Wayne Gretzky and Steve Yzerman — so Coffey, a Hall of Famer like those three, is a qualified expert. And it’s not as though Coffey is alone in that opinion.

Scotty Bowman, the NHL’s most accomplished coach, won one of his nine Stanley Cup championships behind the bench with Lemieux’s Penguins in 1992. The Penguins had won their first title in 1991, and Lemieux, coming off a back surgery in 1990 that diminished his wow-gosh shiftiness and afforded him only two more seasons playing in at least 70 games, had been dubbed the new “Mr. Hockey” by Sports Illustrated after averaging 2.05 points per game en route to consecutive Stanley Cup/Conn Smythe wins.

“That was what people called Gordie Howe,” Bowman said. “To give that to Mario, and he deserved it, was special.”

Arguably, he and the Penguins were at their peak, even with his bad back. He began the 1992-93 season with 39 goals and 104 points in 40 games before missing two months after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease (now called Hodgkin lymphoma).

He returned after eight weeks of treatment, and virtually no time on the ice, to score 30 goals and 56 points in his final 20 games.

“He wanted Wayne’s (single-season points) record,” said former Penguins great Kevin Stevens, referring to Gretzky’s 215 points. “He was going to wipe it out if you ask anybody on our team.

“If Mario doesn’t get cancer that season, he might have got 100 goals and 230 points. I’m not kidding. And we win the Cup again, and he goes down as the greatest ever — even over Wayne.”

In the decades-old debate of Gretzky or Lemieux, Gretzky wins pretty much everywhere but Montreal and Pittsburgh. It’s Pittsburgh where Lemieux is universally viewed as the greatest, and not because of his three Hart Trophies, six Art Ross Trophies and those two Cup wins.

“He’s Paul Bunyan in Pittsburgh,” Bryan Trottier said. “I mean, the story of Mario has so much that you wouldn’t believe it’s real.

“He was never healthy by the time I got to Pittsburgh (1990). He had the back. He had the cancer. His hips were a mess. He couldn’t tie his own skates. Through all of it, he was still the best player in the league, but it went beyond that with Mario.

“He literally made the Penguins what they’ve become.”

Again, perhaps you’ve heard something similar before. For those unfamiliar, consider the circumstances in Pittsburgh following Lemieux’s Hodgkin’s disease diagnosis in 1993:

He played in only 22 games in 1993-94 and sat out the 1994-95 season.
He returned to capture another Hart Trophy, his third, and two more Art Ross Trophies, his fifth and sixth, but retired for three-plus seasons after the 1996-97 season.
He was not paid the bulk of a then-record contract because of ownership’s financial issues.
Amid ownership strife and crippling debt, the Penguins declared bankruptcy a second time and were at risk of being relocated or dissolved in the late 1990s, and Lemieux was their largest owed creditor.

“The Canadiens and Rangers were willing to pay him $25 million to play for them one season,” Johnston said. “He could have done it and made most of his money. But there was no chance. Not Mario.

“The Penguins meant too much to him.”

So, after doing the once-thought impossible by bringing the Penguins even with the Steelers and Pirates in popularity in the early 1990s, Lemieux ended the decade by forming an ownership group to purchase them from bankruptcy. A feel-good story — except that previous ownership had taken renovation money for Civic Arena instead of getting in on the sports facilities legislation that Pennsylvania politicians passed for Pittsburgh and Philadelphia’s teams. Lemieux owned the Penguins, but they remained in a bleak financial situation, especially with Jaromir Jagr’s hefty contract and an unfavorable revenue arrangement at their arena.

“Things weren’t great even after he had control of our team,” said Mike Lange, the longtime voice of the Penguins. “I’ll tell you, if Mario doesn’t come back in 2000, I don’t know if we make it long enough for ‘The Kid’ to arrive however many years later.”

Lange means Sidney Crosby — “Sid the Kid,” whom the Penguins drafted first in 2005. A lot was asked of Crosby, but it was nothing compared to what had been asked of Lemieux.

“Not even close,” said Crosby back in 2016. Crosby played with Lemieux briefly before the latter retired for good in 2005 and spent a couple of seasons living in Lemieux’s guest house.

“I mean, when you think of everything we have here — this (practice) facility, the (current) arena, the expectations — it’s all from what he did for the Penguins. It’s a special thing with Mario and this franchise. I don’t know if people outside of Pittsburgh really appreciate what it is. It’s unique. You just don’t see it very often.”

Michael Farber, who wrote about Lemieux often for Sports Illustrated, cited Babe Ruth with the New York Yankees and Bill Russell with the Boston Celtics as the only comparable athletes to Lemieux in terms of influencing a franchise. Unlike Lemieux, both finished with stints elsewhere — Ruth as a player with the Boston Braves, Russell as a coach/general manager with the Seattle SuperSonics.

Lemieux remains a minority owner of the Penguins.

His ownership group sold to Fenway Sports Group a few years ago, but Lemieux kept a fractional share. He’s not involved in any day-to-day decisions. However, as was evident when he returned for Jagr’s jersey retirement this past February, there is one Penguin who stands above all.

The Penguins carefully planned Lemieux’s participation in Jagr’s jersey retirement ceremony. He did not want to take away from Jagr’s big night. Still, when it came time for Lemieux to be introduced to a sellout crowd at PPG Paints Arena that evening, extra time was built in because the Penguins’ game night operations crew anticipated fans would want to give Lemieux a lengthy standing ovation.

They did. They always do.

“Of course they do,” Trottier said. “It’s not just that Mario was a great player for the Pittsburgh fans. It’s that they saw him deal with the health struggles. They see his charity doing work with the local hospitals. They know he saved the team twice.

“And, let’s be honest, the Penguins became the Penguins — high-flying, high-scoring, big stars like Jags and Crosby and (Evgeni) Malkin — because of Mario. The identity of the franchise is still based on what he was and did.”

Mario Lemieux waves to the crowd at Jaromir Jagr’s jersey retirement ceremony in February. (Justin Berl / Getty Images)

Forty years after drafting Lemieux, Johnston shared his one concern from that day in the Montreal Forum. He had planned to announce the pick in his native French tongue, but he was nervous his excitement would “mess it up.”

He did not.

“I’d spent so much time telling Mr. DeBartolo how special Mario was. He finally said, ‘Eddie, he’s just one man — no one person can live up to what you’re telling me,’” Johnston said.

“I told him, ‘Just watch. Mario’s going to be the best thing that ever happened to this team. They’ll be talking about him long after we’re gone.’”

They are, and perhaps nobody captured Lemieux’s importance to the Penguins better than Farber.

“Ruth and Russell are pretty good company,” Farber said. “Even if you want to look at just hockey, you get to Wayne, as you always do when you discuss Mario. But Wayne belonged to the sport.

“Mario belongs to the Penguins. And he has since he finally put on that jersey.”

Lemieux did don the Penguins crest a few days after the 1984 NHL Draft. There is a picture of him in it, standing atop Mount Washington, Pittsburgh’s skyline as the background.

Johnston loves that photo.

“Mario, wearing our jersey, our city — that’s all you see, and it’s perfect,” he said.

(Top photo: Allsport / Getty Images)

Related Topics:Featured Pittsburgh Penguins

Click to comment

Culture

Jerod Mayo firing was as much about his command off the field as the Patriots’ play on it

Published

5 hours ago

January 6, 2025

Press Room

Jerod Mayo firing was as much about his command off the field as the Patriots’ play on it

FOXBORO, Mass. — As far back as July, when Jerod Mayo arrived at the practice fields out behind Gillette Stadium for his first training camp as coach of the New England Patriots, many prognosticators saw a team that was at the starting point of a big-time rebuild. That the Patriots finished the season with a dismal 4-13 record shouldn’t be looked at as a big surprise.

Why, then, is Mayo out as coach after just one season? We can cherry-pick this or that coaching decision or non-decision, but it wasn’t just what happened on the field that suggested a not-ready-for-prime-time unsteadiness about Mayo. It was also what happened on the record. Almost from the beginning, Mayo’s various media appearances, from news conferences to his weekly morning-drive interview on WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show,” ranged from contradictory and uncomfortable to one unfortunate instance that had a whiff of old-fashioned buck-passing.

GO DEEPER

Patriots fire Jerod Mayo after one season, expected to pursue Mike Vrabel

No one utterance from Mayo led to Patriots fans clamoring for a coaching change. He is, after all, a former Patriots linebacker who in his eight seasons in Foxboro was teammates with the likes of Tom Brady, Wes Welker, Randy Moss. Vince Wilfork, Tedy Bruschi, Rob Ninkovich and Devin McCourty. He also played with Mike Vrabel, the man who could soon be wooed to be Mayo’s replacement.

It’s safe to say Pats fans were rooting for Mayo. But as the verbal missteps continued, it became ever more obvious Mayo lacked the proper amount of training to be a head coach in the NFL.

Statement from Patriots Chairman and CEO Robert Kraft: https://t.co/2YgHtzzBHK pic.twitter.com/GMXGgd768x
— New England Patriots (@Patriots) January 5, 2025

Mayo struck the right notes when he was introduced as the replacement for the legendary Bill Belichick, as when he said, “For me, I’m not trying to be Bill,” and, “The more I think about the lessons that I’ve taken from Bill, hard work works.” He did raise some eyebrows when on several occasions he referred to Patriots owner Robert Kraft as “Young Thundercat” and “Thunder.” Mayo later explained he came up with the nicknames because he felt Kraft, who turned 83 in June, has a “young soul.”

No harm, no foul on that one. But later on, as the losses piled up and Mayo’s public statements became more heavily scrutinized, “Young Thundercat” and “Thunder” were re-examined from critics who believed Mayo had landed the coaching gig because he’d become especially chummy with Kraft over the years. Kraft himself has said he was inspired to view Mayo as a future NFL head coach during the time they spent together on a trip to Israel in 2019.

But it was after the introductory news conference, and after Mayo moved into the redecorated coach’s office at Gillette Stadium, that the media missteps began to pile up.

A sampling:

‘Ready to burn some cash’

Appearing on WEEI on Jan 22, a little more than a week after being named coach, Mayo indicated the Patriots wouldn’t be limiting their roster building to the NFL Draft. “We’re bringing in talent, one thousand percent,” he said. “Have a lot of cap space and cash. Ready to burn some cash.”

The Patriots had somewhere north of $60 million in cap space, but the new coach was soon walking back that comment. “You know, I kind of misspoke when I said ‘burn some cash,’ but I was excited when you see those numbers,” Mayo told Karen Guregian of MassLive. “But when you reflect on those numbers … you don’t have to spend all of it in one year.”

One week into free agency, with most of the top names off the board, “the Patriots roster doesn’t look or feel a whole lot different from the one that went 4-13 last season,” The Athletic’s Chad Graff wrote. They did bring in journeyman quarterback Jacoby Brissett on a one-year deal for about $8 million.

The mixed messaging at quarterback

Almost from the moment the Patriots selected quarterback Drake Maye with the third pick in the draft, Mayo said there would be a “competition” for the job between the rookie (Maye) and the veteran (Brissett). Nothing unusual there, as this is a default quote from coaches after a shiny new draft pick has had his introductory hug with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and been introduced to the media.

But things got complicated when Mayo made repeated references to Maye outperforming Brissett in the preseason, such as when the new coach went on WEEI and said, “This was, or is, a true competition. It wasn’t fluff or anything like that. It’s a true competition. And I would say at this current point, you know, Drake has outplayed Jacoby.”

GO DEEPER

Mike Vrabel, Brian Flores and the top candidates to be the Patriots’ next head coach

Which brings us to an Aug. 28 Mayo media availability that lasted just a few seconds north of a minute.

“We have decided — or I have decided — that Jacoby Brissett will be our starting quarterback this season,” Mayo said.

The competition was fluff after all.

Jerod Mayo is the latest coach to be given just one season in charge before being fired.https://t.co/LIr8PTbGY7 pic.twitter.com/VdDhmC0sa4
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) January 5, 2025

‘We’re a soft football team across the board’

So said Mayo to the media following the Patriots’ 32-16 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars on Oct. 20 in London. It was New England’s sixth straight loss following their season-opening 16-10 victory over Cincinnati.

Not only did Mayo say, “We’re a soft football team across the board,” he took the time to define what makes a team “tough.”

“What makes a tough football team?” Mayo asked. “Being able to run the ball and being able to stop the run and being able to cover kicks, and we did none of that today.”

This was followed by what was now being called Walkback Monday.

“We’re playing soft,” Mayo said during his weekly WEEI hit. “Look, let me just go ahead and correct that. We’re playing soft. Because if you go back to training camp, there was definitely some toughness all around the place. We still have the same players. We’ve just got to play that way.”

It worked for Belichick

There was much buzz over Mayo’s clock management late in the fourth quarter of the Patriots’ 25-24 loss to the Indianapolis Colts on Dec. 1 at Gillette Stadium. With the Colts moving the ball toward the end zone, Mayo did not burn any timeouts in order to keep alive his team’s last-ditch drive if needed.

The Colts, trailing 24-17, rallied for a 3-yard touchdown pass from Anthony Richardson to Alec Pierce, followed by Richardson’s run on the conversion try, giving Indy a 25-24 lead. Only 12 seconds remained in the game, which ended with Joey Slye’s failed 68-yard field goal attempt.

“Absolutely, there was a thought,” Mayo said afterward when asked if he considered using timeouts. “We have also won a Super Bowl here doing it the other way. Keeping our timeouts is what I thought was best for our team.”

Mayo was referring to the Patriots’ 28-24 victory over the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX, when Belichick allowed the clock to run down on Seattle’s last drive. It worked out for the Patriots, thanks to Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson’s head-scratching pass attempt to Ricardo Lockette on second-and-goal from the New England 1 that Malcolm Butler miraculously intercepted to secure New England’s victory.

The next morning on WEEI …

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Mayo said. “When I said it, I was frustrated, first of all, which I should have taken a deep breath. I should not have said that.”

Did anyone get the license number of that bus?

The Patriots’ 30-17 loss to the Arizona Cardinals on Dec. 15 was lowlighted by the team’s inability to gain a crucial first down on third-and-1 and fourth-and-1 from the Arizona 4-yard line. The Pats gave it a go on runs by Antonio Gibson and Rhamondre Stevenson, both of which went nowhere, leading to this obvious postgame question for Mayo: Why not have Maye, a big, mobile quarterback, go for a sneak?

“You said it, I didn’t,” Mayo replied, which was viewed far and wide as a criticism of offensive coordinator Alex Van Pelt. Mayo then followed up with, “It’s always my decision, I would say, look, the quarterback obviously has a good pair of legs and does a good job running the ball. We just chose not to do it there.”

The next morning, on Walkback Monday, Mayo tidied up the comment during a conference call with the media.

“I know there’s a lot of chatter about the question last night, ‘You said that,’” Mayo said. “I didn’t mean anything by that. It was more of a defensive response and, ultimately, I tried to clarify that with the follow-up question. Because ultimately all of those decisions are mine. So just wanted to get that out there.”

Mayo then pivoted to his weekly WEEI hit, during which he said he “shouldn’t have done that. Just like I tell the players, I’m still learning how these things work.”

The benching that wasn’t

On Dec. 28, less than an hour before the Patriots would host the Los Angeles Chargers, Mayo went on 98.5 The Sports Hub’s pregame show and responded to Stevenson’s recent fumble issues by telling Scott Zolak, “Gibby is going to start for us today,” referring to Gibson.

The game began, and on New England’s first possession, it was Stevenson toting the ball for a gain of 5 yards.

Why the sudden change of heart?

“Coach’s decision,” Mayo said after the Patriots’ 40-7 loss to the Chargers.

LIVE: Patriots Postgame Press Conferences: https://t.co/kY9REgnEZn
— New England Patriots (@Patriots) January 5, 2025

The Patriots closed out their season on Sunday with a 23-16 victory against the playoff-bound Buffalo Bills in what may be the most sparsely attended game in the 23-year history of Gillette Stadium.

Mayo was asked 15 questions during his postgame media availability.

The last question: How would you best summarize this year, and did you learn maybe that the team is a little bit further away than you were anticipating?

“I’m not going to get into that,” Mayo said. “Like I said, tomorrow we’ll have a lot of time to talk about those things, but tonight, it’s all about these guys going out there and winning a football game.”

That’s one Mayo won’t need to walk back.

Scoop City Newsletter

Free, daily NFL updates direct to your inbox.

(Photo: Billie Weiss / Getty Images)

Culture

Anita Desai Has Put Down Roots, but Her Work Ranges Widely

Published

13 hours ago

January 6, 2025

Press Room

Anita Desai Has Put Down Roots, but Her Work Ranges Widely

Anita Desai has lived in Delhi and London and Boston, but when she settled, she chose the Hudson River Valley, in New York State. She first came 40 years ago, to visit the filmmakers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, and was so impressed that she later made her home here, on one of the most dramatic stretches of the river.

“I discovered what a beautiful part of America this is,” recalled Desai, 87, sitting in her house in Cold Spring, her living room awash in sunlight and her walls lined with books.

The journey to this point has been long and winding for Desai. For years, she explored a variety of literary and artistic landscapes, from remote Indian ashrams to Mexican mining towns and suburban America, expanding in the process the horizons of generations of Indian writers, both at home and abroad. And now, though she has put down roots in one place, her imagination continues to roam widely.

Her new novella, “Rosarita,” is a slim, enigmatic mystery set in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a ghostly meditation on truth and memory, violence and art. In it, a visiting Indian student stumbles upon traces of her mother’s hidden past as an artist in 1950s Mexico — or is it just a mirage, fed by the “fantasies and falsehoods” of a local stranger?

Salman Rushdie has been a deep admirer of Desai’s work since early books such as “Clear Light of Day” (1980), which he said reminded him of Jane Austen. “Both Anita and Austen present a deceptively quiet and gentle surface to the reader,” Rushdie wrote over email, “beneath which lurks a ferocious intelligence and a sharp, often cutting wit.”

“Rosarita” signals a “new departure for Anita,” he added; with its air of mystery and otherworldliness, it suggests Jorge Luis Borges more than Austen.

A sense of foreignness and dislocation has shadowed Desai from the start. The daughter of a Bengali father and German mother, Desai said she never quite fit in with Indian families when she was growing up in Delhi.

She was 10 when India became independent, and she identified powerfully with the mission of the young country. “We were very proud of belonging to this new, independent India. Being part of this country of Nehru gave one great pride and sense of comfort in those years,” she remembered. “But I outgrew that — well, India outgrew that, too.”

When she began writing in the 1960s, she was influenced by a generation of post-independence authors like R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who was her neighbor at the time, encouraged her literary pursuit. She soon found her material close by.

“That Old Delhi home and life was the one I knew best, the one I wrote about constantly,” Desai said. “After ‘Clear Light of Day,’ I became known as this woman writer who writes about a woman’s position in the family. I did it so often that I saw its limitations, and I wanted to open a door and step out of it.”

The book that opened that door was “In Custody” (1984), an elegy for the rarefied, male world of Urdu poetry that captured “the decline of a language, a literature and a culture,” Kalpana Raina, a Kashmiri-born writer and translator, said over email. It remains one of Desai’s most beloved works, and went on to become a successful Merchant-Ivory film in 1993.

Desai’s work expanded further in the years to come, with a string of novels — “Baumgartner’s Bombay” (1988), “Journey to Ithaca” (1995) and “Fasting, Feasting” (1999) — that featured an assortment of strangers in strange lands.

Desai herself had moved to the United States in the mid-1980s to teach writing at M.I.T. The harsh winters, among other things, were a shock to her system. As the snow piled up that first year, she booked an escape to Oaxaca, in Mexico, never expecting she’d return to the country often over the years.

“Getting to know Mexico opened up another world for me, another life,” she said. “It’s strange because it’s so like India, I feel utterly at home there. And yet there’s something about Mexico that’s surrealistic rather than realistic.”

“Rosarita” — like her 2004 novel “The Zigzag Way” — has been a way for Desai to reimagine Mexico in her fiction. When she came upon the story of the Punjabi artist Satish Gujral, who studied with Diego Rivera and other Mexican muralists, she began to envision a narrative that linked the “wounds, mutilations” of two violent historical events: Indian partition, which cleaved the subcontinent along religious lines in 1947, and the Mexican Revolution, a civil war that began in 1910.

Over time, she teased out the fragments of her tale, weaving in a mother-daughter story line as well — “the most familiar part,” she said. It was a mystery even to her, she admitted, where it would all lead. One thing she did know, though, was that it would be a novella, compressed and impressionistic. She had enjoyed writing her collection of novellas, “The Artist of Disappearance,” published in 2011, and the form suited her.

“It doesn’t take the immense energy and stamina that the novel requires,” she said. “You can finish it before it finishes you.”

While Desai claims this may be her last book, she is relishing the experience of watching her daughter Kiran continue the journey. Kiran’s debut, “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,” appeared in 1998, just after India’s 50th anniversary. Her follow-up, “The Inheritance of Loss” — a masterwork that spanned Harlem and the Himalayas and awed her mother — won the 2006 Booker Prize. Rushdie has called the mother-daughter pair “the first dynasty of modern Indian fiction.”

Kiran is part of an impressive group of Indian novelists who emerged in the globalized 1990s, a far cry from the closed and isolated world her mother knew as a young writer in English decades earlier. “There has, of course, been a huge blossoming since that time and a more seamless connection between India and its diaspora authors,” Kiran explained over email. “I do think it is important to remember that it was lonely writers like my mother who opened the door for subsequent generations.”

Kiran calls her mother’s long writing life a “gift,” and isn’t so sure it’s done yet.

“She was born in British India and lived through such enormous changes,” added Kiran, who often works alongside her mother at her scenic home by the Hudson. “Now she always tells me she isn’t writing, but every time I pass her room I see her at her desk. Her days, at 87, are still entirely made of reading books, reading about books, and writing. It’s as if her whole life has been lived inside the world of art, every experience processed through this lens.”

Culture

Patriots fire Jerod Mayo, expected to pursue Mike Vrabel as next head coach

Published

21 hours ago

January 6, 2025

Press Room

Patriots fire Jerod Mayo, expected to pursue Mike Vrabel as next head coach

FOXBORO, Mass. — The New England Patriots are making a change at head coach, splitting with Jerod Mayo just one year after he replaced Bill Belichick. Now, a franchise that once exuded stability and success like no other in the NFL is about to have its third coach in just three seasons.

New England fired Mayo less than 90 minutes after the season ended Sunday, a disastrous 4-13 campaign (and a Week 18 win that cost the team the No. 1 pick in the draft) in which Mayo routinely seemed to be in over his head in everything from game planning to his remarks to the media. While Mayo was given one of the worst rosters in the NFL, one overseen by executive vice president of player personnel Eliot Wolf, the early indications are that Wolf will remain with the Patriots, according to a team source.

Patriots owner Robert Kraft called the decision to fire Mayo “one of the hardest decisions I have ever made.”

“Unfortunately, the trajectory of our team’s performances throughout the season did not ascend as I had hoped,” he said in a statement.

Statement from Patriots Chairman and CEO Robert Kraft: https://t.co/2YgHtzzBHK pic.twitter.com/GMXGgd768x
— New England Patriots (@Patriots) January 5, 2025
Advertisement

It’s a shocking fall from 12 months ago when it was revealed that Mayo, then 37, was Kraft’s hand-picked replacement for Belichick after 24 years at the helm. Kraft had quietly put the succession plan in writing, meaning the Patriots didn’t have to interview a single candidate before handing Mayo the reins.

This time, that won’t be the case. The Patriots are expected to begin their search for a new head coach immediately, and, according to league sources, the early signs point to one person. Kraft and company are expected to pursue Mike Vrabel, the 49-year-old former Patriots linebacker who shined for Belichick from 2001 to 2008 during the team’s first dynasty, though the franchise must conduct additional interviews for the job in compliance with the league’s Rooney Rule.

Vrabel was the head coach of the Tennessee Titans for six years, leading them to two division titles and an AFC Championship Game appearance while amassing a 54-45 record. But last year, the trust in Vrabel began to erode when team brass watched Vrabel spend his bye weekend in Foxboro being inducted into the Patriots Hall of Fame while soaking up all things New England. During his on-field speech at halftime, Vrabel, still the Titans head coach, even said, “We’ve got a game to win,” in reference to the Patriots. Less than three months later, Vrabel was fired and didn’t land another head-coaching job.

“There’s got to be clear communication with ownership so that we understand as coaches what the expectations are,” Vrabel told The Athletic’s Zack Rosenblatt about what he’s looking for in his next job. “And I would like to be able to say that there’s a quarterback that you feel like you can win with — or that there’s a path to find the one that you can win with.”

For Vrabel, the Patriots likely check both of those boxes. Sources close to the situation believe Vrabel has shown interest in the Patriots’ potential vacancy in recent weeks. He also was interested in the Patriots gig a year ago after their split with Belichick before learning that Mayo had already been earmarked for the job.

At that point, the Patriots thought Mayo would be their coach for the next decade. Kraft and his fellow decision-makers saw Mayo as the right person to follow Belichick because he was a bridge to the franchise’s past success while offering a new path forward.

In the news conference announcing Mayo’s hiring last January, Kraft said he knew in 2019 that Mayo would be the next coach of the Patriots.

“I trust that Jerod is the right person to lead the Patriots back to championship-level contention and long-term success,” Kraft said at the time.

Instead, Mayo oversaw one of the Patriots’ worst seasons since Kraft purchased the team in 1994.

Mayo’s tenure started on a winning note with a surprise upset of the Cincinnati Bengals. Following four straight losses, Mayo turned to Drake Maye, the No. 3 pick in the 2024 NFL Draft, as his starting quarterback, and benched veteran Jacoby Brissett. In the middle weeks of the season, the Patriots pulled out a last-second win over their archrival, the New York Jets, and a victory over the Chicago Bears. Things were looking up.

Kraft and the Patriots knew this season wouldn’t bring a lot of wins. It was the first year of a post-Belichick rebuild. The roster was bad. But they hoped Mayo would establish a culture that led to excitement and improvement by the end of the season.

Instead, the Patriots became a punching bag. After a Week 14 bye, they were blown out by the Arizona Cardinals, blew a 14-point lead to the Buffalo Bills and lost 40-7 at home to the Los Angeles Chargers. A loss on Sunday to the Bills would have clinched the No. 1 pick in the 2025 draft, but rookie backup quarterback Joe Milton led the Pats to a surprising 23-16 win.

GO DEEPER

Jerod Mayo firing was as much about his command off the field as the Patriots’ play on it

In fairness to Mayo, many of the Patriots’ problems preceded him. The franchise is 10-31 in its last 41 games. The Pats haven’t scored 30 or more points in 45 straight games. They are 11-22 at home in the last four seasons. (Tom Brady lost fewer games at Gillette Stadium in his entire Patriots career, going 115-19 at home.) They’ve finished with a sub-.300 winning percentage in back-to-back years, something they hadn’t done since they were the AFL’s Boston Patriots in 1969 and 1970.

But there was no sense by the end of the season that Mayo had the team on track to fix its problems. No position on the roster besides quarterback improved under his tutelage. And while that is a notable exception, Maye’s success as a rookie also ups the importance of ensuring Year 2 is in the right hands.

“We have tremendous fans who expect and deserve a better product than we have delivered in recent years,” Kraft said Sunday. “I apologize for that. I have given much thought and consideration as to what actions I can take to expedite our return to championship contention and determined this move was the best option at this time.”

Mayo becomes the sixth one-and-done NFL coach in the last four seasons and the first one-and-done Patriots coach since Rod Rust went 1-15 with the team in 1990.

All of it proved to be too much too soon for Mayo. The original plan, as dreamt up by Kraft, would’ve been for Belichick to remain the Patriots head coach in 2024, break Don Shula’s all-time wins record and mentor Mayo. But after the succession plan was put into writing, the relationship between Belichick and Mayo deteriorated and Belichick, who was already insular in his approach, withdrew even further. The idea of having Belichick mentor Mayo quickly went by the wayside.

At that point, Kraft decided to split with Belichick and hand the reins to Mayo — even though it was a year earlier than planned and he hadn’t received the mentorship he originally planned on. Sure, Mayo would struggle early on. But the hope was he’d learn on the job and grow throughout the course of the year.

That didn’t happen. In a lot of ways, Mayo tried to be what Belichick wasn’t. As a former player, he tried to be a player-friendly coach, then blasted the whole team as “soft” after a Week 7 loss. He tried to be more affable than his mentor while speaking to the media, then had to walk back several remarks. He said the team would “burn some cash” in free agency, then reversed course a couple of days later and the Patriots didn’t sign any marquee free agents.

After a Week 15 loss, he was asked if offensive coordinator Alex Van Pelt should’ve called a quarterback sneak on an important short-yardage play and replied, “You said it, I didn’t.” The next day, he walked back those comments as “a defensive response.” Before a Week 17 loss, he told the radio and TV broadcast crews that Rhamondre Stevenson wouldn’t start the game to send him a message about his recent fumbles. Then Stevenson started the game.

GO DEEPER

Mike Vrabel, Brian Flores and the top candidates to be the Patriots’ next head coach

More importantly, the on-field product regressed in embarrassing fashion. As a former linebacker who learned under Belichick, defense was supposed to be Mayo’s area of expertise. But a Patriots defense that ranked seventh in yards allowed per game (301.6) in 2023 dropped to 23rd (348.7 yards per game) in 2024. The team’s rushing defense, which ranked fourth in 2023, fell to 25th in 2024. The pass rush struggled to get pressure as the unit ranked last in the league with 28 sacks. The defense also surrendered 30 points or more six times this season.

Offensively, the Patriots didn’t score more than 25 points in a game all season long. While Maye’s ascension was a bright spot, the team lacked playmakers in the passing game and the offensive line allowed the fifth-most sacks in the league. Only the Bears and Carolina Panthers averaged fewer yards per game this season, and only the Cleveland Browns and New York Giants scored fewer points.

Part of the problem was Mayo’s inexperience and lack of familiarity with the rest of the NFL. He was drafted 10th by the Patriots in 2008. The University of Tennessee product spent eight seasons with the Patriots, reaching two Pro Bowls, winning Associated Press Defensive Rookie of the Year honors in 2008 and being named a first-team All-Pro in 2010. He played the entirety of his career for Belichick. He spent five years as a position coach with the Patriots and only ever worked for one coach: Belichick. So when it came time to fill out his staff, Mayo didn’t have the Rolodex of league-wide contacts most head coaches do.

He interviewed more than a dozen offensive coordinator candidates because several declined his offer. In the end, Mayo began his tenure surrounded by a first-time front office leader (Wolf), a first-time offensive play caller (Van Pelt), a first-time defensive coordinator (DeMarcus Covington), a first-time special teams coordinator (Jeremy Springer), a first-time linebackers coach (Dont’a Hightower), a first-time offensive line coach (Scott Peters) and a first-time wide receivers coach (Tyler Hughes).

The inexperience showed.

Sources from within the Patriots’ previous regime expressed skepticism that Mayo was ready to be a head coach. Several leaders thought he needed more experience with game planning, play calling and handling big situational decisions. How’d this season play out? “About how we thought,” one said.

Whether it’s Vrabel or someone else, the incoming coach will inherit a rising talent in Maye at quarterback, Stevenson at running back, cornerback Christian Gonzalez and a stout defensive line led by Keion White and Christian Barmore. New England will pick fourth in the 2025 draft. The team will also have a plethora of cap space to address multiple needs on the roster — most notably wide receiver, offensive line, defensive back and pass rusher.

— The Athletic‘s Jeff Howe contributed to this report.

Required reading

• Is coach Jerod Mayo’s job in question after another frustrating Patriots loss?
• How does Drake Maye compare to Mac Jones? They’re closer than you might think
• Patriots’ offseason priorities: A look at the team’s shopping list in free agency

(Photo: Richard Heathcote / Getty Images)