Mac Jones not 100% in return
Mac Jones returned as starting quarterback for the New England Patriots just four weeks and one day after a significant high ankle sprain in his lead leg. As the National Anthem played, Adam Schefter reported “It would not be a surprise to see both Patriots QBs, Mac Jones and Bailey Zappe, play tonight.”
I’m going to be honest, what happened next surprised the heck out of me.
Jones played 3 offensive series. 17 plays. He handed the ball off 7 times. We all have 10 plays to decide if he was healthy enough to be terrible.
Jones completed 3 of his 6 passes. One was dropped. He threw off of his back foot on 3, including the ugly sailed interception that ended his night. With a lead leg injury passes can sail, but it’s hard to pin all of the blame on the ankle.
Jones ran the ball in a straight line twice. Looked good doing it. With an ankle injury, the real challenge is lateral movement, pivoting, and deceleration. In our incredibly limited sample size, we saw that Jones’ footwork was still a bit hampered. When he scrambled and ran to the right, he was able to pivot toward the first down line. However, when Mac scrambled to the left side, it appeared that he could not turn the corner on his injured ankle and instead slid awkwardly:
Mac Jones is not 100% physically healthy. He’s likely not even 90%. With this kind of injury, that was never a reasonable expectation just 4 weeks later. Was he healthy enough to play? In the 10 non-handoff plays I saw, probably? There’s no way of knowing if he could have lasted a full 4 or even 2 quarters given that we didn’t get a chance to even see him “knock the rust off” as Greg Bedard put it.
The real surprise of the night for me was the team’s willingness to further injure the psyche of their recovering quarterback by abandoning the “if you’re cleared, you go” philosophy. Mac was cleared to play, but at some point he was made aware that he would be sharing time with backup Bailey Zappe. While teams sometimes work injured players back in gradually, that rarely happens at the quarterback position. Every physical injury has a mental component and a lead leg injury in a quarterback has got to be at the top of that list. Telling Jones that he would be pulled at some point undoubtedly hurt him, but the real dagger came when the home crowd chants for “Zappe, Zappe!” echoed through the stadium just 6 minutes into the 2nd quarter. I don’t understand why anyone would put a starting quarterback in that scenario.
It’s situational football.