New England Patriots

Mac Jones vs. Cam Newton: The NFL’s most intriguing guessing game

Published Aug. 18, 2021 10:00 p.m. ET

By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist

The season is fast approaching, the New England Patriots haven’t yet announced their starting quarterback, and when Bill Belichick is asked about Cam Newton and Mac Jones, he talks extensively.

Just not about them.

In response to questions about Newton, Belichick speaks about his defenders and how they tackle, about his running backs and receivers and how they handle the ball, about the offensive linemen and the work they’re doing together, and even about the punt team and their preseason preparation.

When probed about Jones, he discusses the speed of the modern game and how every player on his roster, on both sides of the ball, needs to adapt to it.

He’ll even, sometimes, address the reporter quizzing him by name — "That’s really true of every player, Mike" — but in his near-daily briefings, there is no "Cam" or "Mac," no "Newton" or "Jones," no "No. 1" or "No. 10." (Granted, Jones wore the Patriots’ traditional first-draft-pick No. 50 for the early part of camp.) This is a strategy designed to give nothing away — and Belichick has taken it to an extreme level.

The first (and second) rule of the quarterback competition is … yeah, you know the score. Don’t mention it.

Every day, as the campaign rolls closer, the question of whether it will be the former MVP-winning veteran or the promising, young first-rounder from Alabama taking the new season’s initial snaps remains the one everyone wants to know about.

And every day, amid a whole lot of words that don’t amount to much, there is no mention of the guys in question, even when a question is specifically and directly about them.

Belichick is not going to tell us why he does it this way, so we have little choice but to guess. Most likely it is an attempt to not play into the circus of preseason, in which limited information means that each phrase uttered about key players in a position battle is parsed and scrutinized, including the tone of voice in which it's delivered.

Belichick probably knows whom he is planning to start under center when New England hosts the Miami Dolphins on Sept. 12, but he doesn’t want to show his hand to the general public or to either of the men involved. At the same time, he doesn’t want his QBs to think too much about the competition and not enough about how they can improve.

"We've told all the players, from back in May when we started, which is the absolute truth, not to spend a lot of time worrying about who else is out there with you," Belichick said. "Worry about what you're doing, and try to get it right. I think that's the most important thing for each and every one of us is if we would focus on what our job is, how to do it well, how to do it better."

This wasn’t an issue when Tom Brady was in town. For nearly two decades, no one was guessing about who would be handling the opening plays of a season in Foxborough. Now they are, after Newton struggled at times during the Patriots' first losing season in recent memory and Jones was the fifth QB taken off the board in the draft.

"Is there a franchise right now in the NFL that has a worse quarterback situation than New England?" FS1’s Colin Cowherd asked on "The Herd." "You have Cam, a former playmaker who's beat up physically and a shell of his former self. And then you have a kid with a low ceiling who's not really ready to play."

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It feels like a sideshow, but it is difficult to know how to describe it, as it’s far from trivial to the team’s chances. This is one of the more fascinating stories of the summer. We all want more information about it, yet the coach doesn’t want to acknowledge that the situation exists.

Newton showed some irritation when quizzed this week and said Belichick has not given him any kind of indication one way or another.

"Y’all sitting up here asking silly questions to me, and I’m looking at y’all with the same thing, so I don’t know what y’all want me to say," Newton said. "No, you know that he hasn’t said that, so for you to just ask the question, you know what it is.

"Every single day, I’m coming out here with the anticipation to get better, and that’s the only thing that I can do."

Newton and Jones both have some limitations, but they are all Belichick has to work with right now. In truth, there are plenty of teams with worse QB situations. This one just stings so severely because it comes on the back of all the years of Brady’s consistent excellence.

Belichick didn’t win six Super Bowl rings by being unable to deal with adversity, and he will have his own ideas on how to shepherd the offensive unit toward a productive campaign.

For now, though, the code of silence rules — and the guessing game must continue.

Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider Newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.