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Mac Jones is authoring his comeback story in San Francisco — and one of his former coaches is loving it.
Jones went 3-0 the last three weeks while filling in for injured San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy. The often-maligned Jones completed 66.7% of his passes while throwing six touchdowns and just one interception, and looked much more like the player he was during his rookie season with the Patriots.
Speaking of Jones’ time in New England, his former head coach at Alabama, Nick Saban, recently offered surprisingly candid thoughts on how Bill Belichick handled the 2021 first-round pick. Saban is close friends with Belichick, but that didn’t stop him from criticizing the NFL legend for surrounding Jones with subpar coaching and offensive weapons after his rookie campaign.
“I’m so happy for Mac,” Saban said last week on the “Pat McAfee Show”, as transcribed by ESPN’s Mike Reiss. “I think Mac was one of those guys who was in bad situations relative to coaching and all that type of stuff, and who was the offensive coordinator and how did he get developed.
“Right now, I think he is in a really good circumstance with (Kyle) Shanahan, their offense, the players he has around him. He is a guy who will execute. He’s really, really smart, so he’s going to do exactly what you tell him to do. And he wants to know exactly what you want him to do. I’m not sure he always got told exactly what was expected of him before going to the 49ers.”
Jones impressed in 2021 while playing under offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels, who left after the season to become head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. Belichick responded by installing Matt Patricia and Joe Judge — a defensive and special teams expert, respectively — as the top offensive coaches in 2022, and the results were disastrous.
The following year, Belichick hired the capable Bill O’Brien as offensive coordinator, but prevented him from hiring his preferred position coaches. The result was an offense that lacked cohesion and reliable skill players.
Along the way, Belichick fomented a quarterback controversy that helped to derail Jones’ confidence and gave fans and reporters every reason to believe he’d soured on New England’s franchise quarterback. Belichick was fired after the 2023 season, and Jones eventually was traded to the Jacksonville Jaguars, for whom he served as Trevor Lawrence’s top backup in 2024.
Jones signed with the 49ers last offseason to back up Purdy, but now appears primed to start for the foreseeable future.
“Yeah, very possible we see another start for Mac Jones, or even more than that,” NFL Media’s Ian Rapoport reported over the weekend. “My understanding of Brock Purdy’s setback, and remember, he was dealing with turf toe — it was two to about five weeks recovery time — he played in that third week, so pretty early on in his recovery, early on in his rehab, and then went out, got tackled in basically sort of the...
