The first difference in the new head coach’s office is obvious. In fact, for any player passing by on the ground floor of Gillette Stadium, it’s impossible to miss.
Jerod Mayo’s desk is right by the door to his office. When Bill Belichick was New England’s coach, the desk used to be around the corner and invisible to passersby. But Mayo moved the desk so it was planted square to the entrance. Now whoever comes in, or even meanders past, immediately sees the new guy in charge.
“It used to be over here, so you’d never know if [the coach] was in or not,” says Mayo, pointing to his left, at a table and some chairs that were moved in the process. “I put my desk here, and I leave my door open. When guys walk by to leave work, they see me in here. They can walk in. I want that type of relationship. I want that type of communication.”
It’s just one of many cosmetic changes to the Patriots’ facilities over the past seven months, since Mayo, 38, became the second-youngest coach in the NFL. (The Seahawks’ Mike Macdonald has Mayo beat by 16 months.)
Not a single one of the changes was accidental, though Mayo’s first offseason as a head coach has required a balancing act that lacks precedent. He played all of eight of his NFL seasons as linebacker under Belichick from 2008 to ’15, and worked on his staff starting in 2019. He believes in so much of what the coach who won six Super Bowls with the franchise had taught and built. Yet Mayo knows that a copy-paste of the Belichick program won’t work. He wants to honor the team’s past but realizes some renovation is needed on a football operation that went 29–38 the past four years, including a 4–13 crash and burn last season.
And so, yes, he’s made lots of changes to the look of the facility. There’s a mural on a nearby wall, painted by a local artist, that has Mayo putting his arm around a kid in shoulder pads, a reminder that no one makes it alone. There’s a basketball hoop in the building now, an intentional upgrade from, and nod to, when Mayo and his teammates created “Trashketball,” shooting crumpled-up paper into cans with makeshift backboards in the locker room. There’s a new players lounge, too, with more games.
But if you’re looking for something truly indicative of the tightrope Mayo’s walking, it’s in that hallway outside the office. As you enter the building and pass by the coach’s quarters, to the right are displays celebrating the accomplishments of the franchise, decade by decade, with the 24-season Belichick Era figuring prominently. But to the left are new painted slogans—progress … process … payoff and hard work works—with red stars affixed above them all the way to the right, positioned like asterisks.
Those red stars—more on these later—are another marking of the arrival of a new era. The idea behind them wouldn’t be foreign to Belichick. But Mayo’s packaging of it is very, very different.
