Kicking off Week 5 of the 2025 NFL season on Thursday, the injury-ridden San Francisco 49ers were in a classic western showdown with the Los Angeles Rams at Sofi Stadium. To win this game — one in which practically everyone counted them out — the 49ers needed to show up big. Ironically, it was one injured player who made the biggest difference: backup quarterback Mac Jones.
In a 26 – 23 overtime win to take possession of first place in the NFC West, a battered Jones had a career night, throwing for 342 yards and two touchdowns with a 67% completion percentage, posting a final passer rating of 100.9. 142 of the yards were to wide receiver Kendrick Bourne, who Jones previously threw to during his New England tenure.
Fans and media pundits immediately compared Jones’s career to that of quarterbacks Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold and Jared Goff. These were all seen as “mediocre or worse” quarterbacks who found success later in their careers. This trend in quarterback performance has captured recent NFL discourse since people have generally moved on from quarterbacks that didn’t immediately take off. The idea that a quarterback could somehow develop into a star after a few years of bad tape was foreign, at least up until now.
It isn’t difficult to see why Jones gets placed on a list of supposedly ameliorated quarterbacks. Outside of a solid rookie campaign in 2021 with the Patriots, between 2022 and 2024, Jones was one of the worst quarterbacks in the league. During this time, he was continuously benched by former Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and traded to the Jacksonville Jaguars where he was mediocre at best. Many thought his career might’ve been over, and the narrative that he never had starter capability in the first place ramped up. Therefore, his 2025 resurgence to a level of play that has so far succeeded his rookie season has come as a welcome surprise to many.
The cause of such a career arc among these quarterbacks is threefold, and Jones perfectly encapsulates them all. One of the obvious answers is simply the talent surrounding the quarterback. During his rookie year in New England, the position players around Jones were underrated impact players such as Bourne, Jakobi Meyers, Rhamondre Stevenson, Damien Harris and Hunter Henry. According to PFF, his connection with Bourne that season was the fourth most prolific in the league, averaging a passer rating of 137.8 when targeting him. Jones also benefited from a top ten offensive line that season. Currently, on the 49ers, Jones is paired with star backs Christian McCaffrey and Kyle Juszczyk, wide receiver Ricky Pearsall and once again, Bourne.
Between his rookie year and the current season, some of that positional and line talent was lost and certainly contributed to his decline. However, this doesn’t completely explain the fall off, given that the difference in talent was not big enough to produce the abysmal seasons his offenses produced in 2022 and 2023, and the mediocre 2024 season. A second key factor to career success that fills this gap is coaching, more specifically, the scheme Jones was playing in.
During his rookie season, Jones shined under New England’s offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels. Jones is excellent at quickly executing short and intermediate throws to dink-and-dunk down the field and was able to connect on occasional deep shots if available despite having what fans called a “noodle-arm.” Combined with a strong running game that opponents were forced to respect and a vintage Belichick defense to rely on, Jones led one of the NFL’s best offenses that season. In 2025, Jones now finds himself with head coach Kyle Shanahan, whose 49ers employ a West Coast offensive philosophy emphasizing exactly the concepts that made Jones successful in his rookie year.
In 2022, McDaniels left the Patriots organization and his replacement was Belichick’s long-time friend and defensive assistant Matt Patricia. It was a shock to no one when the offense, including Jones’s play, heavily regressed that season. The team struggled with basic fundamentals: blocking was horrendous and seemingly destroyed Jones’s internal clock, and the offensive scheming was so bad that after a home loss to the Bills, Kendrick Bourne publicly expressed frustrations with the coaching staff. Later on in Jacksonville, he continued to suffer from poor coaching under offensive coordinator Press Taylor and head coach Doug Pederson.
In his final season with the Patriots in 2023, Jones actually did have a solid offensive coordinator in Bill O’Brien, who previously had coached Tom Brady to some of his best personal seasons. Despite this, Jones’s numbers fell even harder, and he was eventually benched for good. This is because coaching is not a one-dimensional job — a good understanding of “x’s and o’s” and fundamentals is half the battle. Being motivational and stimulating confidence is the other half, and is the final key factor explaining quarterback resurgence, especially for Jones.
It’s no secret that by 2023, Belichick’s relationship with many in the Patriots organization had been deeply strained, killing the atmosphere in New England. MassLive’s Mark Daniels would eventually report that support given to Jones by coaches was practically nonexistent. A quarterback cannot possibly succeed under such conditions, and a legendary coach such as Belichick undoubtedly knows this. Recent behavior coaching at the University of North Carolina indicates that perhaps he just doesn’t care anymore.
After defeating the Rams, Jones told the media that pregame, Shanahan was “pissed” that the 49ers were underdogs. He told Jones to “let it fly,” to which he responded, “You don’t have to tell me twice.” Though quarterbacks nowadays have renewed their careers for various reasons, with Jones, it was a combination of them all, but none more important than finally getting a coach who believed in him.