FOXBORO — The worst thing that could have happened to the Patriots under Jerod Mayo happened first and it happened last.

They won.

Four months ago, the Pats opened this season by bloodying the Bengals for their biggest upset in almost a decade. It felt like a franchise returning to its roots, yet ready for rebirth following a modern version of an old football formula.

Then, less than 24 hours later, Mayo took a stunning victory lap.

He told reporters that concerns about the Patriots’ offensive line, which had allowed pressure on almost half of the team’s passing plays, were “overblown.” During an interview on WEEI, he guaranteed the Patriots would “always” field a strong defense. He even dared opponents to stop their run game.

That was all in one hour.

That morning, Mayo teased the worst of himself as a leader; a man whose immaturity is inseparable from his geniality and whose ego blinded him to the pitfalls that would eventually befall him and his team. He couldn’t handle success after the least telling week of the NFL season, and told the world that win had actually revealed something meaningful.

Of course, Mayo would later walk it back when he described the Patriots’ winning formula in Cincinnati as unsustainable. But it took another month and three brutal losses for him to come around to that idea. It took being humbled.

In the meantime, Mayo got out-coached in a Week 2 loss to Seattle; the first of many times his staff would trip the team up in a close game. Three weeks later, Mayo botched an identical end-of-half clock management sequence against the Dolphins that also surfaced against Seattle. The Patriots lost.

New England Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo walks off the field after an NFL game against the Cincinnati Bengals last Sunday. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Now, it was one thing to suffer tight losses and growing pains. It was another not to learn from them. Mayo became the very thing Patriots coaches have long detested: an error repeater.

Not only on the field, but at the podium, where Mayo may have dug his own grave. He should have known better.

The Krafts will swallow losing, but not embarrassment. Under Mayo’s watch, their franchise became a laughing stock locally and nationally. His media missteps only offered fuel for ridicule, and you’d imagine ownership’s anger.

Remember Mayo called his own team soft, an insult he didn’t realize was actually a boomerang that whipped blame back at him; the man either coaching that softness or allowing it to fester.

Remember Mayo chose to drive into the wind during overtime at Tennessee, and the only explanation he could muster afterward was acknowledging the wind had changed from the start of the game.

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Remember Mayo invoked Bill Belichick’s clock management at the end of Super Bowl XLIX while defending his refusal to call timeouts while the Colts marched to a 25-24 comeback win.

“I should not have said that,” he later sheepishly told WEEI. “I should not have said it.”

Remember the loss after their bye week, and how Mayo tossed his offensive coordinator straight under the bus. “You said it. I didn’t.”

Remember every time Mayo claimed that if you just excuse a few big plays or this half or that quarter, the Patriots’ losses weren’t so bad. Remember how that habit for half-assed rationalization trickled down to his defense, a unit that pointed fingers almost every week while receiving every excuse from their head coach and grew soft and selfish.

Remember Mayo told a local radio analyst and national television broadcasters he was benching the butterfingered Rhamondre Stevenson to hold him accountable, then Stevenson started.

New England Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo during the second quarter of an NFL football game against the Buffalo Bills, Sunday, Dec. 22, 2024, in Orchard Park, N.Y. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Remember at the end, an unserious football game capped an unserious Patriots season and levied dire consequences for their head coach. But before Mayo was shown the door, he won, and the franchise lost.

By beating the Bills, Mayo cost the Patriots the No. 1 overall pick in the draft; annually one of the most prized trade assets in the league. An asset more valuable than most Pro Bowlers and certain All-Pro players. An asset that can fundamentally shift the timeline and potency of a rebuild.

Now that pick and all those possibilities, just like Mayo, are gone.

Decisive as they were, the Krafts do not deserve credit for pivoting to a third head coach in as many seasons. Robert Kraft decided Mayo would succeed the greatest coach of all time on a 2019 trip to Israel before he even coached a training camp practice. He wrote the succession plan into Mayo’s contract back in Jan. 2023, when the plan was for Mayo to work under Bill Belichick for two more seasons.

Instead, that power dynamic lasted one year, strained their relationship and divided a staff and made casualties of a Patriots team that sunk to historic lows in 2023. So exit Belichick, enter Mayo, and despite the fact he matched Belichick’s 4-13 record last season, Mayo met the same fate Sunday because losing is always the symptom.

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The Patriots continue to lose because of their lagging roster talent, sure, but also coaching. Culture. Infrastructure. Ineffective leadership, from the top down.

Around Thanksgiving, word leaked to certain NFL circles that Mayo wasn’t getting his arms around the job, whether he knew it or not. That word came courtesy of his own colleagues.

“There’s a general feeling by many in the building that the job’s too big for him right now,” a league source told me last week.

Some Patriots saw it then. Ownership learned soon after. In the final moments of his last press conference as head coach, it was clear Mayo still didn’t understand.

“Like I said, tomorrow we’ll have a lot of time to talk about (the season),” Mayo told reporters, “but tonight, it’s all about these guys going out there and winning a football game,.”

Then Mayo stepped down from the podium, walked toward an open door, turned a corner and disappeared; from sight and for good.