The New England Patriots have struggled in recent years since the departure of Tom Brady, and the lone year that they saw some success was with Josh McDaniels as the team's offensive play-caller.
After McDaniels left, Matt Patricia took over as the team's de facto offensive coordinator, and things went downhill quickly.
Former Patriots running back Damien Harris believes that a lot of the problems offensively were due to those in charge of that side of the ball.
What were the issues exactly?
"Structure or just the correct offensive system being put in place," Harris said earlier this week on "The Athletic Football Podcast" with host Robert Mays. "Imagine I was playing Madden, and I was flipping through Madden and every time I saw a play and I ran it on Madden I was like 'Oh, that works. Let me put it in my coaching playbook, and let me give that to a group of professional football players and create an offense with Madden plays, and let's just see if it works.'
"Because, I'll tell you, there were conversations that we had amongst each other where we genuinely felt like our intelligence as football players was being insulted. If you're going to present this to me and think that I'm going to go along with this and just think this is going to work [you're wrong]. There would be times when we would be presented with information, and we would just be right off the bat like 'This (expletive) isn't going to work.'"
Bill Belichick's decision to allow Patricia to run the offense was questioned by many when it happened, and everyone who doubted it was proven right. It led to an unwatchable product and led to the failure of Mac Jones in New England.
