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Hallie Grossman
IT’S THE THICK of summer training camp when a glass drops and shatters in the New England Patriots’ cafeteria. A record scratch might as well ring out from the amps on the nearby practice field as the bustling room comes to a standstill: Oh, Mack, wait. Don’t go anywhere.
Mack Hollins hasn’t consistently worn shoes in the past decade, not since he started working with a cadre of holistic Australian trainers who extol the virtues of naked feet. He’s barefoot today, as normal, or at least his normal, and the cafeteria staffers need him to freeze in his tracks. They’d like to clean up the mess, lest one of the team’s newest wide receivers land on the injury report: downgraded to out (glass shards).
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Mack, stop.
He does not. He continues on with a smile, then greets former Patriots Devin and Jason McCourty, who are in town to watch practice and who each catch the staff looking at Hollins, bemused.
Hollins signed with the Patriots, his fifth team in the past five seasons, in March, so he is still new in Foxborough, and that means The Mack Hollins Experience is still fresh in Foxborough, with the team getting a crash course. Coach Mike Vrabel has noticed the offense starting to drag late in practices this summer, waiting for someone to make a play. He watches Hollins do just that. Offensive tackle Caedan Wallace has «sauna talks» with Hollins, who expounds on the esoterica of Point Nemo, the most remote place on Earth. Special teamer Brenden Schooler hears Hollins yelling on the sideline at him, at opponents, whenever Schooler lines up as gunner. Everyone has seen him traipse through New England shoeless.
«Man, I’m not worried about that glass,» Hollins says, now traipsing through the cafeteria. «My feet have seen worse.»
He walks on, unhurried and unbothered, and well on his way to becoming something unexpected here: the beating heart of this team.
The Patriots, against all odds and recent history, are plucky upstarts. Fun and — avert your eyes — likable. And there, in the joyous center of it all, is a shoeless wonder.
«I think,» Schooler says, «every locker room needs a Mack Hollins.»
Tommy DeVito says, as though milk — like a dry sense of humor or introversion — is a personality trait. Though, in Hollins’ case, it almost is. «Raw milk,» DeVito clarifies.
Hollins is a proponent of raw milk («Right from the udder») because he says it offers more vitamins, and DeVito was swayed enough by Hollins’ pitch that if he sees raw milk available, he’ll grab some for himself.
Efton Chism III, the team’s rookie wide receiver, hasn’t said whether he has joined the raw milk brigade, but within the confines of Gillette, he has been anointed «Mini Mack Hollins.» The two arrive at the facility in the predawn hours. They set up camp in the wide receivers coach’s office to get a leg up on the day’s practice plans. They schedule extra runs on off days, which they do together and barefoot. Chism never really put much stock in running during off days before joining New England, and certainly not shoeless, but he «just started following Mack around,» and here he is.
People do seem to just start following Hollins around. Mitchell Trubisky was the starting quarterback in college when they both played at North Carolina, then the Bills’ backup quarterback when Hollins joined Buffalo in 2024, and he watched his friend form a devoted following with both teams.
«He comes to Buffalo, he’s walking around in bare feet all the time,» Trubisky says. «And then, you turn around a couple weeks later, and we got half the team wearing no shoes at our walkthroughs.»
Hollins makes believers out of people, Trubisky posits, because Hollins is a believer in them.
Ahead of Trubisky’s redshirt junior season in Chapel Hill, he was preparing for his first college start, relishing the idea of having two seasons of eligibility left to make an impression on NFL scouts. But Hollins, in his last season, insisted that if he had only one year left, so did Trubisky. They’d simply play well enough together to force the NFL’s hand. (They did. Trubisky, now famously, was drafted No. 2 in 2017, after just 13 collegiate starts.) «He changed my whole mindset,» Trubisky says.
Depending on which teammate you ask, Hollins is «aggressive.» Or «blunt.» Or «cutthroat.» Some take the scenic route, but they all arrive at this destination: He is honest, borderline strident, if he believes in something — whether that something is why watermelon juice provides superior hydration on game days («Water is a scam,» he once said), or what he deems possible for his teammates. Like Trubisky, or Chism now, who will make a play he’s pretty proud of, then debrief with Hollins only to have his mentor go full drill sergeant: Man, that was all right. But you should have scored.
In an NFL locker room, where the players’ bodies are supersized, and their egos are even bigger — that candor seems ripe for rankling. And yet, Chism smiles and says, «Good old Mack,» which seems to be the prevailing sentiment. Good old Mack dispenses with pleasantries and makes himself indispensable.
In 2016, the year Trubisky started for North Carolina, the Tar Heels had a very un-Tar-Heels-like start to their season. They won seven out of their first nine games. They earned a top-15 ranking, which had prevously happened in just one season in the 21st century. Hollins did not lead the team in receiving yards in any games that year — that honor primarily went to Ryan Switzer — but when Hollins broke his collarbone halfway through the season, something shifted for that team. «We lost our anchor,» Switzer says. Then, the Tar Heels lost three out of their last four games. «It’s really why our year ended up going the way that it did — ‘cause we didn’t have him, his presence.»
New England also lost Hollins for a spell. He was on pace for one of his best seasons to date — 550 yards and a pair of touchdowns in 15 games — before an abdominal injury landed him on injured reserve in late December. The Patriots were not unmoored without him; they beat the Chargers in the wild-card round, then the Texans in the divisional round. Career year aside, Hollins is not this team’s — nor would he be any team’s — No. 1 receiver. Maybe not even No. 2. He has never come close to 1,000 receiving yards in a season in eight years in the league. But if you look closely, you’ll find the Patriots enduring the same Mack Hollins-shaped hole that North Carolina did a decade ago.
«It’s tough,» Drake Maye said in a radio interview after Hollins went down. And though not much else has been tough for the Patriots’ second-year quarterback this year — he will either be crowned MVP in a few days or runner-up — this one stung. «He’s a glue guy for us.»
It feels as if NFL coaches need a PhD to run a good offense these days, but this much is simple: The Patriots want this guy around. Within his first two weeks in Foxborough, he was on a first-name basis with just about everyone walking the halls. He goes to weekly Friday dinners at a local Korean barbecue joint with a small delegation of New England’s offensive line. For reasons that remain unclear to his teammates, he’ll bellow «White 80, White 80,» and that’s how they’ll know he’s in the building — knowledge that seems to make them feel warm and fuzzy, like he’s a security blanket. Or an anchor.
Before their playoff win against Houston, wide receivers Kayshon Boutte and Stefon Diggs reminded each other: «One more game, and we get Mack back.»
Hollins’ stint on the IR would be done by the AFC Championship Game. He’d be back where the Patriots want and need him. And just how they like him. By the time the title game against the Broncos rolled around, he entered Mile High Stadium clanking a trio of glass bottles, hollering «Warriors, come out to play» — a deep-cut homage to a 1979 cult classic film — then made a pair of catches for a team-high 51 receiving yards.
Good old Mack.
Kyle Williams, says. «You know one person’s going left, and that’s Mack.»
But he goes left with intention. He eschews footwear as a way to get back to humans’ original ways of movement. He eats with his hands because it aids digestion, he says. Even when he arrives at stadiums in cosplay — as a patriot (non-football variety), a chess piece, a muppet, to name a few — there is good reason. When he pulled up to the Bills’ stadium last year as Fred Flintstone, the horned hat he wore was a nod to the cartoon’s Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes, of course, but was also handcrafted by a group of women from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Burma, who immigrated to Buffalo, New York.
His eccentricities are undergirded by curiosity. Hollins devoured National Geographic as a kid. These days, Trubisky says, Hollins takes apart his dishwasher, only to reassemble it, just to know how it works.
And that curiosity is a rejection of idleness. In college, he had his laptop open on the team plane, and when his coach, Larry Fedora, walked by and asked what in the world he was doing, Hollins explained, «I’m learning how to type. I’m not going to waste my time just sitting here on a plane.» He has pursued a real estate license, a pilot’s license, and his current passion project is regenerative farming. He recently purchased a plot of land in Georgia, and though it’s early days — he’ll bring in goats soon to eat down the weeds and brush before growing the grass — the dream is for everyone in his family to have their own cow. All the better to eat pasture-raised meat.
Hollins is one-of-one and he contains multitudes. He researches hard and runs hard; his catch radius is as wide as his thirst for knowledge is deep; he’s an outside-the-box thinker who happens to be an outside-the-box player. Nobody’s No. 1 receiver, perhaps; just your favorite player’s favorite teammate.
Last month, the Patriots played Buffalo at home with a chance to clinch the AFC East. Hollins walked into Gillette shoeless (how else?), but this time, shirtless, too, despite the sub-freezing temperatures and the snow drifting down in Foxborough. And there, once more, was the full Mack Hollins Experience. A little off-kilter but grounded in purpose. He walked into the stadium without a shirt, says his mom, Karyn, because he planned to walk out in some newly earned AFC East champs swag.
New England didn’t win that day; the division honors came two weeks later. But now, Hollins will have his shot at a do-over, with a much loftier title at stake. And when the Patriots play in their first Super Bowl since the Tom Brady-Bill Belichick days, look for him: your favorite player’s favorite teammate, in all his intentionally curious and curiously intentional glory.
