After beating the Bills in the final game of the 2024 regular season, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft announced that he had fired Jerod Mayo after only one season as the team’s head coach.
"Unfortunately, the trajectory of our team's performances throughout the season did not ascend as I had hoped."
— First and Pen (@firstandpen) January 5, 2025
Patriots owner Robert Kraft has fired HC Jarod Mayo after one season.
Like 2023, Bill Belichick's last season with the team, the Pats finished 4-13 again this year. pic.twitter.com/OYhRZmhyTc
“Unfortunately, the trajectory of our team’s performances throughout the season did not ascend as I had hoped,” wrote Kraft in a release posted on X.
While the move was not completely surprising as the Patriots finished 4-13 again this season, duplicating last year’s record under Bill Belichick in his final season with the team, it’s a frustrating and maddening decision because it adds another name to the “clean-up man” list which is comprised of Black coaches hired solely to navigate a team through troubled waters only to be fired in favor of a white coach.
“I think it was unfair to coach Jerod Mayo. I mean, he never had the chance to develop as a head coach, he was just a rookie himself in that department,” said former Patriots star Rob Gronkowski. “And if you judge a coach by their first year, that’s really..not appropriate.”
Sometimes Black coaches are given a few seasons to weed out the drama, but many times they’re one and done.
It’s a long-established practice in the NFL, one that we, and especially First and Pen contributor Lou Moore, have written extensively about.
The Houston Texans were recently guilty of this practice.
Trying to recover after Bill O’Brien’s disastrous final season, where he was fired after a 0-4 start in 2020, the Texans hired former Ravens assistant head coach, David Culley, as their new head coach.
The Texans were reeling from a series of events that included the latter part of O’Brien’s tenure, a 2017 PR nightmare caused by former owner Bob McNair’s infamous “inmates running the prison” quip after players started kneeling (he apologized and then re-negged on his apology), his passing a year later, GM Rick Smith taking a leave of absence to care for his ailing wife (she passed in 2019), the rise of former EVP Jack Easterby and, finally, Deshaun Watson.
In response, the Texans hired Culley and, devoid of talent, the team finished 4-13 and he was fired at the end of the season (ironically, after O’Brien was fired, Romeo Crennel finished the season out at 4-8).
