Jerod Mayo’s influence spreads quickly, albeit against the bumbling Bengals

After one game, it appears that the rumors about Mayo connecting with young Patriots players were true.

Not to dim the guiding light currently towering above Gillette Stadium ($5 admission gets you a bird’s eye view of the illustrious Walpole Motel), but Pete Carroll also won his first game as head coach of the New England Patriots. So did Dick MacPherson. (Rod Rust actually won his second game with New England before dropping 14 straight in the midst of what were dreary years in Foxborough).

Carroll (1997-99) went 27-21 during his three seasons here, but he’s more regarded for slowly turning a Super Bowl team into one better suited for Huntington Beach. The fiery and upbeat MacPherson (1991-92) injected some energy into the franchise, one suffering a major Rust hangover, by helping turn the one-win Patriots into a six-win team during his first season at the helm. That’s as good as it got.

Both coaches might come as warning signs for anybody ready to immediately consider Jerod Mayo a candidate for Coach of the Year. Nerd Brandon Staley won his first game with the San Diego (I know) Chargers. So did Mangini, Al Groh, and Carroll (all with the Jets).

And yet, despite that cynicism, you’d have to be demented to insist that there wasn’t a different feel that came from Sunday’s season-opening, 16-10 win over the Cincinnati Bengals.

Mayo became the first Patriots head coach since MacPherson to win his NFL head coaching debut, an accomplishment that Mayo matched by running into the forever-dysfunctional Bengals, a franchise that spent more time this offseason whining about paying its players than it, apparently, spent watching film of Rhamondre Stevenson. That doesn’t diminish the Week One achievement, just serves it with sides of Derek Carr had three passing touchdowns and Sam Darnold finally won a game at MetLife.

In no other professional sports league can a 1-0 record breed such excitement, particularly with a team that many expected to find its first win sometime around when Planet Fitness starts sponsoring everything. My own son started talking New England’s Wild Card chances after the first touchdown. We’re looking at boarding schools.

Reality is, despite their 1.000 percent winning percentage, the Patriots have won one more game than the 2008 Detroit Lions. The celebration shouldn’t lie in the victory though. The Patriots aren’t going to make the playoffs even if they are already one-quarter of the way toward last year’s win total (what a relief to not be inundated with Bill Belichick’s slow march to Andy Reid’s eventual crown). After months of being fed how much influence Mayo was having on the young players, fans got to see the results in action on Sunday with a clear message: The Patriots may not be going anywhere this season, but they’re going to try to take you down with them. If they can.

Forget about what a mess the Bengals remain; it doesn’t matter that Zac Taylor has now lost five of the six season-openers in which he’s been the head coach or that the Ja’Marr Chase contract saga seemed more a concern than the New England Patriots did last week. This was still a day to celebrate rookie head coach Mayo.

If you remember, it’s not like Mayo was everybody’s top choice to take over in the shadow Belichick left behind, especially when the Tennessee Titans fired Mike Vrabel, long-figured to be the top target for New England whenever Belichick’s time was finished. But Patriots owner Robert Kenneth Kraft already had a back-door agreement that it would be Mayo who would take the role in that situation. So much for a thorough head-coaching search.

Which is why all those missives from training camp about how well Mayo was building this team sounded like good ol’ Patriots propaganda in the wake of Robert telling us all how he knew Mayo would be his head coach as early as 2019, when the former Patriots linebacker joined the team owner on a trip to Jerusalem. It’s a good tale that makes you wonder just a bit. Kraft was so convinced that Mayo would be such a good head coach that he chose Belichick over Monty the Color Man wanna-be Tom Brady when it came down to, “it’s him or me.” Wonderful. At the very least, he might have spared us Cam Newton.

But after one game, it appears that the rumors about Mayo were true. The players have seemingly bought into the new life he has instilled in the locker room after a handful of seasons when most of their buying was land, elsewhere. It’s been a while since we’ve watched a team of underdog Patriots want to play that hard for each other. It showed.

Yet, quarterback Jacoby Brissett still managed to pass for only one more yard (121) than Stevenson had on the ground, which means the offense leaves a lot to be desired, as was expected. But Brissett excelled for the real reasons he was in there in the first place over third overall pick Drake Maye. The veteran served as a calming presence and effective leader for a team nobody believes in.

If you really want to get excited though, there’s the defense. Despite losing Christian Barmore to blood clots and shipping Mathew Judon to Atlanta, the Patriots continued Sunday on some of the promise they started to build last season. Like Belichick before him, it’s where Mayo will likely shine in his stint as head coach, creating a defensive unit reminiscent of the ones he was on with guys like Rob Ninkovich, Devin McCourty, and Vince Wilfork.

It’s easy to get carried away. But…the Bengals.

One thing is clear; Mayo is not going to be any sort of Dave O’Brien for the Patriots, leaving fans thirsting for the old guy to take his spot back. The win put the ‘-30-‘ on Belichick’s legacy in Foxborough, finally opening the door to a new generation of coaching.

“When you hear about all the, ‘this guy’s a guru, this guy’s a guru,’ that’s not really what it is,” Mayo said during his Monday morning conference call. “It’s about how do you get the guys to understand conceptually what we are trying to do as a unit. So many times, there have been good players where they only know their spot. They only know what they have to do. Give me that average-to-above-average player that is a conceptual learner, and we can do something special with them.”

In the minds of most, before Sunday, “something special” might have accounted for a handful of wins. Did we just simply forget how useless the Bengals are during the first few weeks of the season, or are these Patriots perhaps better than anyone thought?

It’s hard to believe that, at one point, Rod Rust had a .500 coaching record. If Mayo can manage that over the course of 2024, nobody is going to be whispering about Belichick, Vrabel, or anybody else taking his spot.

And you wanted Josh McDaniels….