Instead of preparing for his fourth season as the New England Patriots’ starting quarterback, Mac Jones is getting ready to back up Trevor Lawrence with the Jacksonville Jaguars.

The reason for that, former New England running back Damien Harris said, lies at the feet of former Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who isn’t with the NFL team anymore either.

When Jones joined New England from Alabama as the 15th selection in the 2021 NFL Draft, Belichick was entering his 20th season as the Patriots coach – nine of which had ended in the Super Bowl – and Harris, a former Crimson Tide teammate of Jones’, was going into his third season in the New England backfield.

In his rookie season, Jones started every game, the Patriots went to the playoffs and the quarterback went to the Pro Bowl.

But after that season, offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels left to become the coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, and Belichick put Matt Patricia and Joe Judge in charge of the offense. New England went 8-9, and Jones, who missed three games with an ankle injury, slipped from 22 touchdown passes to 14.

In 2023, New England brought Bill O’Brien from Alabama to serve as offensive coordinator. But the Patriots slipped to a 4-12 record and benched Jones for the final six games of the season after he had started the first 11.

In March, New England traded Jones to the Jaguars.

During an appearance on “The Athletic Football Show” on Thursday, Harris said Belichick deserves the credit for the Patriots’ success, but he also deserves the blame for the unraveling of Jones’ career.

“Obviously, all of the success that was had in New England was because of one person, and it wasn’t Tom Brady,” Harris said. “That one person was Bill Belichick, because there were guys like Matt Patricia, like Joe Judge who left and went other places, and whatever, however their situation worked out, they ended up coming back. All of sudden, Matt Patricia goes from defensive coordinator to offensive coordinator. Well, why is that? It’s because we’re all just pawns in Bill Belichick’s game of monopoly, and we can all be moved and we can all be interchanged. You coached here all your life? Screw that. You can go coach here because as long as you imply and install what I am teaching, what I am coaching, then the team will have success.

“And I think that is what led to kind of the tide starting to turn, trouble starting to arise because then you start putting – like, I’m going die on this hill, and people might be upset with me, people might be happy with me, people might be somewhere in between: What happened to Mac Jones in New England, was not because of Mac Jones. What happened in New England to Mac Jones was because of the fact you took away an offensive coordinator who coached him to be a Pro Bowler and almost coached us to winning our division with a rookie quarterback his first year. Whenever Josh McDaniels left, then you take Matt Patricia who’s coached defense his entire life, Joe Judge who’s been a special-teams coach, coached receivers at some point, and then you just throw them in there and say, ‘Hey, coach this kid up. He’s a first-round pick, but as long as you teach him what I say, everything’s going to be fine.’ (Expletive) wasn’t fine.

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“Now Mac Jones is in Jacksonville. Now they’re on to Drake Maye. They’re on to a whole – it’s like the breath of Mac Jones in New England, it came and went. It shouldn’t have been the way that it went. The only reason that it did was because Bill Belichick, being stuck in his ways, was very much so like, ‘As long as I am here. As long as I am, along with Robert Kraft, the top dog at this organization, no matter who, no matter where, what position, where they coach, whatever, we will have success.’

“I think that kind of started with the Cam Newton situation where we brought in Cam Newton, because everybody was like, ‘Yo, what the (expletive) is this? Why Cam Newton?’ Bill thought that he could make it work. It didn’t really work. Then we drafted Mac. We had a hell of a year that year, my third year in the league, his first year. Had a hell of a year, went on a seven-game win streak. Started off rough, started off kind of rocky. Went on to win seven straight. At that time, we were kind of looking at ourselves like we might have a Super Bowl run right here as long as people keep playing well, so on and so forth. And then the next year after that you replace, like I said, Josh McDaniels with Matt Patricia and Joe Judge and then look at the year we had that year, and then the following year, and now Mac Jones is all of a sudden gone. I think that everybody can look at what I just said, and, ultimately, look at it and just watch it for what it was and kind of a say that maybe Bill Belichick did not do right by Mac Jones.”

Before the 2022 season started, Harris said the Patriots knew they were turning into “the Bad News Bears of the NFL.”

“We knew before our first game, we knew during training camp, we knew. We knew,” Harris said. “There were a lot of conversions between some of the leadership group at the time. … I remember OTAs, minicamp, we were having these meetings where we were sitting around talking amongst each other: How are we going to tell Bill that this (expletive) ain’t working? How are we going to tell Bill that his (expletive) is not working at all? …

“We just saw the disservice that all this disorganization and all of this basically (expletive) hitting the fan, we saw what it did to Mac. Not only for his career, but we saw what it did to him mentally.”

Harris played the 2023 season with the Buffalo Bills and retired this offseason. Belichick was replaced after New England’s 4-13 showing in 2023.

Harris said he hopes Belichick gets another coaching opportunity because, along with Harris’ Alabama coach Nick Saban, “he was the greatest coach, greatest mentor, greatest teacher of the game of football.”

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Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at @AMarkG1.