The 2022 New England Patriots are a tribute band, not a world-beater

Whatever shards of the Patriot Dynasty still standing on Sunday night, Chandler Jones smashed them into powder, and he used Mac Jones’ helmet to do it.

Jones, a 6-foot-5, 260-pound defensive end for Las Vegas and a onetime Patriot himself, had just caught the single dumbest lateral of the decade, maybe of all time — a panicked, desperation, no-time-left-on-the-clock heave from New England receiver Jakobi Meyers that Jones happily caught and began angling upfield. The only Patriot in his way? Mac Jones, who put up all the resistance of a polite request. Chandler Jones caught the ball, turned, put one hand on Mac Jones’ face, and rammed the overmatched quarterback into the earth’s core.

Touchdown, game over, Patriots’ 2022 playoff hopes splintered, Patriots dynasty dead.

If you’re of a certain age, you’ve seen the bands of your youth try to recapture their golden years with reunion tours and tributes. Sometimes they’ll have a member of the original lineup onstage, an aged reminder of the cruelty of time. They’ll plod through their old hits, and the audience will cheer and sing along, but the edge is gone. They’re summoning up memories, not energy.

That’s where New England is now, a tribute act harkening back to past glory days, not the bleak ones of the present. They may be dressed the same as the Patriots' dynasty of old, but they’re not anywhere close to hitting the same notes.

Even though the Walkoff Lateral is one of the single dumbest plays in NFL history, right up there with Leon Lett’s Super Bowl showboat or the Butt Fumble, it feels a little strange, laughing at the Patriots. After 20 years of New England rising from the dead time and again to stomp teams into paste, it’s like whistling past the graveyard. Don’t make too much noise, Belichick will hear you! And he’ll humiliate your team from every angle! But after a play like that — a play that Meyers later admitted he freelanced on his own — what else is there to do but laugh?

Once again: Meyers made the decision to throw that lateral on his own. A player on a Bill Belichick-coached team decided to go off-script. That doesn’t happen. That can’t happen. And if it had happened at any time during the flying-high years of the Patriots dynasty, Meyers would have needed to find his own ride home, and probably without three or four of his fingers.

It’s tough to read much into Belichick’s public persona because the man is usually sour and grumpy every time he’s on camera. But after such a devastating loss, he turtled up, growling out the minimum necessary number of syllables to make the questions go away.

"The play didn't work. Made a mistake on the play,” he said Sunday evening. Monday morning, he was no more expansive.

“We obviously need to play better situational football,” Belichick told WEEI’s "The Greg Hill Show."

“Obviously the play didn’t turn out anywhere close to the way we wanted it to, so I’ll just leave it at that.”

The lack of discipline is most surprising about this year’s Patriots model. Meyers’ ill-fated, cross-field duck is only the most obvious example of a sloppiness that’s pervading the team, from mental mistakes and costly penalties to curiously conservative play-calling. Cameras caught Mac Jones begging the Patriots coaches to “throw the f*****g ball!” during New England’s recent loss to Buffalo. Frustration is boiling over.

The tentative, uncertain nature of the New England attack is what’s most disorienting for NFL fans long accustomed to seeing the Patriots carve up everything in their path. Jones ranks 23rd in passing yardage, 33rd in completed air yards and 30th in passer rating, per NFL Next Gen Stats, a black-and-white condemnation of the Patriots’ struggles under center.

“It's a very conservative pass game, lots of screens,” Arizona Cardinals defensive coordinator Vance Joseph said of New England’s offense last week. “It's like a defensive guy's calling offense. It's how a defensive guy would call offensive plays, right? Let's not turn the ball over, let's get 4 yards a play, try to burn clock, and that's what they're doing.”

NFL fans won’t feel bad for the Patriots, and they shouldn’t. New England fans have no right to complain about anything until 2040 or so. Some charitable souls will feel a twinge of pity that Belichick is sputtering this badly. But most will recall the way that Belichick and New England crushed everything in their paths, without mercy or a care in their hearts, and call this a case of the football scales balancing out.

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Contact Jay Busbee at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or on Twitter at @jaybusbee.