Oct 20, 2024; London, United Kingdom; New England Patriots coach Jerod Mayo watches from the sidelines in the second half of an NFL International Series game at Wembley Stadium. Patriots’ HC Jerod Mayo during an Oct. 20, 2024 NFL game. (Kirby Lee/Imagn Images.)
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One area where the NFL is often differentiated from college football is lessened numbers of at-kickoff surprises. That includes diligent practice participation and injury report notes throughout the week leading up to a game, but it also usually has meant lower numbers of sudden game-day decisions on who’s starting. But New England Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo made one of those Saturday.

Ahead of the Patriots’ game home against the Los Angeles Chargers, Mayo made a bold declaration on his plans at running back. There, Mayo said they would start Antonio Gibson at running back due to a NFL-high seven fumbles from Rhamondre Stevenson, backing up hints at that he’d dropped all week.

Mayo told that on-air to Scott Zolak of the team’s radio broadcast on 98.5 The Sports Hub, and also indicated it to NFL Network TV broadcast analyst Ross Tucker. And that information then got picked up and spread further by NFLN insider Ian Rapoport:

Here’s how Tucker relayed that on the TV broadcast, about 20 minutes before kickoff:

But, as noted there, when the game started, it was indeed Stevenson who got the start:

There are two potential ways to get to this outcome. Either Mayo made a split-second decision between the time he told this to Zolak and Tucker (similar to Bears’ head coach Thomas Brown changing his mind on a punt versus fourth-down-gamble Thursday, and wasting a timeout in the process), or he flat-out lied to the media. And, if that’s the latter, this is particularly strange considering the seeming minimal potential gains and significant possible losses from this approach.

What do the Patriots actually gain from inaccurate media reports on who they would start at running back 20 minutes before a game? It seems like not a lot. There certainly could be an information edge for an opponent if they figure out which running back will get a significant majority of the carries early in the week and spend more time preparing for them and their specific running style. But in an uncertain situation like this, they’re likely preparing for both anyways.

And what’s particularly wild here is that the “starter” is not required at all to get the majority of the carries. Indeed, through the first two and a half quarters Saturday, Gibson got five carries (and produced six yards), while Stevenson only got two (and produced one). So if Mayo’s comments were meant to indicate an emphasis on Gibson, they were correct. But his comments indicated one simple, definitive, and easy-to-achieve fact: Gibson would start. And that didn’t happen, to the chagrin of many:

This isn’t entirely unexpected. Mayo’s predecessor as Patriots’ head coach, Bill Belichick, was notorious for all sorts of attempts to be vague if not deceptive with media, especially around running back usage (leading to significant warnings about drafting New England RBs from many fantasy experts for decades). And there have been other NFL shenanigans around starters, including from the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin, albeit not usually with outright counterfactual infromation. And Mayo himself has at the least dropped hints about using Gibson over Stevenson before before not ultimately fulfilling that, including earlier this week.

What’s particularly annoying about this, though, is that it looks like misinformation that doesn’t accomplish anything. The actual outcome achieved here was possible with zero inaccurate information to media. How running backs will be used throughout the course of games is a coach’s decision, and can be a spur-of-the-moment call, based on performance in the game thus far. And there’s no obligation to play the starter more, as Mayo’s calls to emphasize Gibson during the game show.

But “starter” is a binary black-or-white, true-or-false piece of information. And Mayo provided one piece of information there, which was dutifully reported by media expecting him to be telling the truth, only for him to turn around and do the exact opposite. He very easily could have avoided this just by starting Gibson, as he said he would, and then using the RBs as he wished beyond that. And, at the very least, the discrepancy here is going to lessen media trust in anything he has to say going forward.

Does that actually matter? Well, it matters for fantasy players and gamblers in the error of player props (Stevenson was -113 for over 42.5 rushing yards at FanDuel). And while coaches shouldn’t be making decisions based on that, the combination of fantasy and gambling is a key part of why the NFL actually has notable injury reporting, and why there are less of these sudden game-day starts than we’ve seen in college. (And it should be noted that sudden start changes have been a key part of major gambling scandals in college.)

This probably isn’t at the level where there are league consequences for Mayo. And as noted, Belichick got away with all sorts of media shenanigans throughout his tenure, and still wound up landing a million media jobs post-NFL coaching before he decided to return to coaching at the college level. But it’s still disappointing to see a coach tell a broadcast something that so quickly turns out not to be true, making the broadcasters and other media members who took the coach’s relayed information at face value look bad in the process. And it doesn’t seem like the best approach.

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About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

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