The New England Patriots are hiring Jerod Mayo as the franchise’s new head coach, reports said Friday, the day after Bill Belichick announced he was leaving after 24 seasons with the team.
Mayo is set to be formally announced as the new coach at a news conference next week, according to ESPN. At 37, Mayo will become the youngest coach in the NFL and also the first Black head coach at the Patriots.
Mayo, who played as a linebacker for the Pats between 2008 and 2015, joined Belichick’s coaching staff in 2019. Following news of Belichick’s departure, Mayo was widely considered a likely candidate to replace him. The club announced in January 2023 that it had started contract extension talks with Mayo which would keep the linebackers coach at Foxborough for the “long-term.”
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The Patriots actually wrote in Mayo’s contract extension that he would follow Belichick as the next head coach, according to The Athletic. The language in the document reportedly allowed New England to hire Mayo without engaging with the standard NFL hiring process which would have meant interviewing additional candidates for the job.
He definitely has a tough act to follow. Although the Patriots posted their worst record (4-13) under Belichick’s tenure in 2023, he led them to an unmatched six Super Bowl titles. At a news conference Thursday, where Belichick and Patriots owner Robert Kraft announced their mutual decision to part ways, Kraft went so far as to claim that what Belichick accomplished with the franchise “will never be duplicated.”
“We had a vision of building a championship football team that has exceeded my wildest dreams and expectations,” Belichick said at the conference. “I’m very proud of that. I’ll always have those great memories, will carry those with me the rest of my life.”
