Patriots

Malik Cunningham left the Patriots without throwing a single regular-season pass for a 3-10 team with quarterback issues. That’s a shame.

COMMENTARY

Last month, I asked Patriots great Kevin Faulk if he had any advice for Malik Cunningham.

Mac Jones was struggling, and Bailey Zappe was being used only in case of emergency. And yet Cunningham, who flashed potential during the preseason, had only appeared in one game against the Raiders.

“Be patient,” Faulk advised Cunningham. “If it ain’t here, it’s going to be somewhere else. If you trust in God, it’s going to be somewhere. Business, you know?”

Faulk’s words rang true. Baltimore signed Cunningham to it’s 53-man roster this week. Instead of toiling on the practice squad of the 3-10 Patriots, Cunningham gets to reunite with old college teammate Lamar Jackson and experience a playoff run.

Cunningham’s time in New England ended before he could even throw a single pass during the regular-season, and that’s a shame.

Jones’s 11 consecutive starts to begin the season make it clear that the plan was for New England to ride with him until the wheels fell off. That made sense at first, considering that he was a first-round pick, played well during his rookie season, and was expected to make big strides of improvement in Bill O’Brien’s offense.

But things went bad quickly for Jones. He threw a pick-6 on the first drive of the season. Several more followed over the next few weeks. He ended up throwing more interceptions than touchdowns.

The Patriots waived Bailey Zappe on cutdown day. Despite that, he has a 3-1 record as an NFL starter and showed last Thursday that he’s worthy of more opportunities. Still, he was completing 40 percent of his passes at the time when he got the nod to start against the Chargers.

Why on earth, in a year when the Patriots are averaging a league-worst 13 points per game in part because of consistently bad quarterback play, would they not exhaust all options at the position?

No passing attempts for Cunningham, who threw for 7,889 yards and 62 touchdowns at Louisville and is responsible for more touchdowns than any other Cardinals quarterback ever including Jackson?

That’s the guy they looked at and said “hmmm, maybe he should practice mainly as a receiver and spend time working as special teams gunner?”

Where were the reported packages that would involve Cunningham? No rushing attempts for an athlete that JuJu Smith-Schuster called a “dangerous dude?” Nothing?

Credit to the Patriots for signing Cunningham in the first place. He did go undrafted, so it’s not like other teams were clamoring to get him in the beginning.

But, there are questions about why he wasn’t used in the Patriots system at all and what the Ravens see in him that New England wasn’t sold on.

In a farewell social media post for Cunningham, Patriots offensive lineman Trent Brown told the quarterback to “go flourish where your talent is respected.”

Why couldn’t that be here?

“They sold him on the opportunity, the offense, Lamar, so certainly their offense suits Malik better than any other offense in the league,” Patriots coach Bill Belichick told reporters on Tuesday.

I asked O’Brien in the week leading up to the Chargers game what traits would make the Patriots look at a college quarterback’s tape and decide he’s a better fit as a receiver.

“He did a lot of great things at Louisville,” O’Brien said. “I actually went to Louisville and worked him out, and he had a lot of traits that could lead you to believe that he could play quarterback, but also that he could do some things as a receiver whether it was speed, overall athletic ability, his hands, the way he caught the ball.”

“He did a lot of different things in the workout that we had with him including throwing the ball, he played a lot of quarterback in the workout and did a nice job. So those are the things that led us to believe that he could find a role on the team.”

I’m not saying Cunningham should have been the Patriots’ starter. Who knows if he’ll actually develop into a good quarterback in the NFL? But, the Patriots have the league’s worst offense and are already mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. How much would it have really hurt to find out?

As O’Brien said, Cunningham has some promising traits and it would have been nice to know whether they would have panned out for the Patriots.

But, unfortunately, we don’t get to find out. The Patriots didn’t play him, and now he’s gone.