Patriots Insiders: Benching Rhamondre Stevenson ‘should be on the table’ for the team in Week 4 👀

Patriots Insiders: Benching Rhamondre Stevenson ‘should be on the table’ for the team in Week 4 👀

Patriots running back Raand Andre Stevenson fumbled twice in the team’s 21-4 loss to the Steelers. He fumbled the ball a league high seven times last year. So today, Phil Perry asked Mike Rabbel if he feels like he knows guys well enough to hold them accountable. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do, but I, you know, I mean, also got to try to to balance, you know, winning football games and gaining yards and and scoring points and, you know, all all those things, right? So there’s a um you know we just we just got to get it fixed and I know there’s no easy fix and the only thing I know how to do is is work and we’ll work at it and if I feel like or we feel like that it’s you know in the best interest to to limit those opportunities then then we’ll have to do that. All right let’s deep dive these Patriots turnover problems. Phil, you asked Mike Frabel that question and you just said a few minutes ago that you have good running backs behind um Andre Stevenson and Antonio Gibson and Tayvon Henderson. So maybe you sit him. Do you think the Patriots will go so far as to sit Raandre Stevenson? I think it’s possible. It feels like Mike Frabel’s left the door open for that. He said today, we’ll see later in the week what that means in terms of reps for Raandre Stevenson after that kind of performance. He said last night, you know, I’m only 20 minutes from the end of the game here. We we still have to talk about it, but that’s an indicator, Tom, that there is a decision to make. It is not just let’s just continue to plow ahead and roll forward with what the options have been in the past. So, to me, yeah, I I think it should be on the table. You have a deep running back room. You have an opportunity to lean on someone else here. Why not do it? He’s fumbled nine times since the beginning of last year. Nine. If you don’t do something about it, if you allow him to go out there and he fumbles again, then who’s stupid? Who’s the dummy? The the manager who allows that to continue to happen without having enough ramifications and enough time to fix it. None of these fumbles are coming because of explosive and unexpected contact. He’s getting his arm brushed on so many of these or overfighting. It’s how much of it’s mental then. Correct. I think there’s a component. He actually kind of acknowledged that there was a mental component to it. Um, to me it’s a physical issue. Kevin Faulk overcame it. I don’t care if you have to have Kevin Faulk move into Raandre Stevenson’s house and or condo, but it is fixable. Do you remember how Kevin Faulk beat it? Because my question is Bill Bich beat the puss out of great and said you can’t have the ball anymore. He cost him like 35 points in 2000. Single-handedly cost him like seven, excuse me, five touchdowns. But I look at Stephvenson and it’s the Patriots fault now if he goes out there and fumbles again and puts them uh in the crosshairs. And and I look at Stephvenson too and think to myself, you know, Phil and I were just discussing this. There is a psychological barrier I think to that this team is confronting as they try to get better. Um you know, Drake May came from a seven and four near dwell program. Raandre Stevenson was a fourth overall pick, exc um fourth round pick. Demario Douglas went to Liberty and and was a sixth round pick. Some of these guys, I think, don’t have yet the belief maybe that I am in an elite program at an elite level and I need to make elite decisions. And I think it’s important for the coaching staff, too, to to look at their locker room and even if they know it’s not perfect yet and the talent isn’t where they want it to be yet and three years from now they think it’ll look much different, I think it’s important for them to project an air of, hey, we expect to do well here. I I don’t think that existed last year because they were trying to be realistic, which I I don’t blame them for. That was one of the worst rosters in football, but when you allow the winning to become the norm, when you allow that to become the expectation, it’s really really hard to dig yourselves out of that. So, even though it’s year one of your program and you want to manage expectations, I understand that. That’s fine. But it can’t get to the point where, hey, we’re losing games. We weren’t expected to win these games anyway. Let’s get incrementally better, even if it doesn’t mean W’s on the the the column there. That I I just think looking at last year, if you allow yourself down that slippery slope, it can make for a long season. What sucks, Treny, is you can you don’t have to go back more than like 105 hours to see when Raandre Stevenson was exhibiting why the Patriots would give him $36 million. He was the best player in some ways the week before against Miami. So, that’s the conundrum. So that’s what I wonder. We’re going to talk about Drake May in a second, but if you don’t play him like you suggest, Phil, does that end up hurting Drake May? I I I think it has the potential to. It’s a fair question. I just wonder if the the logic would follow thusly. Okay, Raandre Stevenson, he’s our best back, but he’s out. We got to sit him because the fumbles are are getting to be too much. So now we have to be more of a pass happy team, I guess. So Drake, good luck. But it’s going to be another 40 plus dropbacks in week four. the same way it was in week three, loss. The same way it was in week one, loss. If they want to be balanced, are they looking at Stevenson and saying, “Well, this guy’s the key.” Do they look at Antonio Gibson the same way? Do they look at Trayvon Henderson in the same way, Tom? I don’t know if they do. It feels like everybody just holds Raandre Stevenson and his level of talent in such high esteem that taking him out could really impact how they construct a game plan. And that to me might not be good for Drake May, who needs balance right now at this stage of his career. Yeah. And maybe I misspoke. I meant to say Randre Stevenson. He had a very good game against Miami and he had the 55 yard catch. He exhibited for you exactly why. I think you said it right. Okay. So that’s exactly why you want to put that faith in him because Henderson might be a terrific player at some point and Gibson is a very good player, but Stevenson at his best is extremely hard to tackle, can catch the ball, and is fast and explosive and kind of a home run threat. We’ve seen it happen. All right. Well, I just said how would that affect Drake May? It’s time now for our Ford big board. Here are Drake May’s stats against the Steelers. went 28 to 37 for 268 yards, two touchdowns, a pick, and a from the loss. He could have easily though had a total of three interceptions on the day. He had one that was dropped for sure. After Sunday’s game, Mike Brael talked about what he saw from the young quarterback in the game. Unfortunately, some some decisions that have to be better. Um, I’m sure we’ll have to protect them better. Um, and just understanding that you don’t have to win it all in one play. there’s opportunities to uh move on and and and save the day the next play and just can’t put the ball in harm’s way at that position. Like K, we just talked about if you bench Roandre Stevenson, you might be putting Drake May in harm’s way. You may not be putting him in the best position to win. You can’t bench him. There’s nobody else behind him. But how do you drill into Drake May that he has to make better decisions, particularly in crucial moments? It’s there’s no way to to to bang him on the side of the head with a rolled up newspaper and say cut it out because there’s such in the- moment decisions. When we watch that play that he fumbled on near the end of the game, we’re sitting there watching with Scott Poli and Scott saying as the play is developing, look at that. That’s good growth. He’s got two hands on the ball. Look at that. Boom. He tries to throw it at the end of the play and the ball pops out. So you have made incremental progress for for 2.1 seconds he was doing the right thing. Can they eliminate that last point four seconds when his brain goes kabooy? And I do think that that’s the way it happens. Look, Tom Brady had a game in Denver in 2001 in October when he was, you know, really playing well. He had four picks on four possessions in Denver when the Patriots were in position to win. Drew Bledo had a five pick game as a rookie. Drake May is going to get better. He’s going to eliminate this stuff. We just have to keep watching it, unfortunately, and saying, “Well, he can’t do that.” No crap. Yeah, I think it can be learned. I think what the Patriots are hoping hoping for can be learned. And I think to some degree, you don’t want to completely beat out of him that hero ball sensibility that he at times possesses on the football field because that will lead to special plays at various points over the course of his career. It’s understanding in the moment as it’s happening. Being almost to to see yourself from a third person vantage point and say, “This ain’t the time, Drake. Okay, buddy.” And hold on to the football and go down or throw the football away. We saw it in the first preseason game. We saw it yesterday. We saw it last year. He makes these decisions in real time that we can all see are not the right decision. It’s just a question of whether or not that switch flips for And that’s why I think a lot of us wonder like is this just the the growing pains of a young quarterback? Um or is it more indicative of like what his long-term potential is? I’d like to think it’s just indicative of a young quarterback because I’m with Phil. I don’t want to see them like rein him in to the point where you take away his best attributes, but it also Tom needs to be where you have to rein him in. Yeah. And and it would be wonderful if they could do that. But that’s where Mike’s commentary about balancing trying to win football games and be productive and make yards and score points has to be balanced with trying to send the message. It’d be great if the Patriots and Vrabel could go Parcels and say, “You know what? We’re not throwing the ball. We’re going to run it every down.” Well, you can’t because running backs will fumble too frequently, but that’s what Parcels would do. He’d say, “You know what? You can’t throw the ball, Drake. You know, sorry, you’re really productive, but we don’t trust you.” And then he has to sit there and hand it off for an hour. They can’t do that because the running backs don’t hold on to it. But he is going to work through it. He’s going to be a better, smarter player uh this week than he was last week and next year than he is this year. All right. Well, Curran wrote an entire article about the Patriots making stupid costly mistakes. And Pop Douglas was guilty as charged. Yesterday with the game on the line, Drake May through to Douglas, who needed only about two yards for a first down, but rather than go forward, he went backwards in an attempt to get around defenders. Game over. Here are Pop and Mike Frabel on the play after the game. Did you think you were at the first down? Uh, or you didn’t know what? Yeah, I was somewhere by I know I was somewhere by it cuz we only had two yards. So, you knew you probably had to make a play. I’m guessing after you caught the ball, Mike Douglas play was that route run to the proper depth at the Well, we need to probably get one revolution further, but even if we don’t, we just have to knife when we get between two defenders. You know, again, we had great examples in Miami where we split those guys and what happened here and how do they handle Pop Douglas? Well, first of all, I sat here on at this desk on Postgame Live and said, “I don’t blame him for going backwards. He He had too far to go.” He didn’t have too far to go. He was at the freaking line. All he had to do was burrow, as Phil said, and everyone was polite and didn’t make me feel stupid. But I apologize to all viewers who had to listen to me say he didn’t have room to try and make the first down. Yes, he did. Again, he has to be somebody who lets the game slow down the same way Drake May does and say, “I’m not at the proper death depth, have that in the back of his mind as he’s making the catch and understand what he needs to do instead of getting scatterrained.” Bad move by Douglas and I felt like, you know, Mike Frabel talking about, you know, that’s a decision you got to make for the team is be able to knife and borrow and take that punishment because it’s coming for the betterment of the team. That to me tells me that was not an inconsequential just a one hiccup, one bad play kind of thing for Pop Douglas in Mike Frabel’s eyes. And so I wonder Treny if we do see some Fton Chisum moving forward if he’s healthy enough because those guys are basically playing the same position. Pop Douglas has done very very little over the course of the first three weeks here might be time to make a move. Which also talks a little bit about the team’s overall philosophy and the coaches getting used to the players. Why is the smallest player getting the ball in a critical critical spot when he hasn’t yet been that productive and he’s probably not going to plow through people? Give it to Matt Collins. Give it to somebody else. Although Matt Holland did the same thing in that game yesterday. Caught it and did the tried to do the whole loop around and didn’t get there either. Current wrong again.

Phil Perry and Tom E. Curran join Trenni Casey on Arbella Early Edition to react to another week of mistakes from the Patriots offense and debate if it’s time for Mike Vrabel to send a message to his starters. The guys discuss why benching Rhamondre Stevenson, who fumbled twice more on Sunday after doing so seven times last year, should be on the table for the team in Week 4 vs. the Panthers. They also discuss more poor decision-making from Drake Maye and DeMario ‘Pop’ Douglas and how the team should go about improving their play going forward.

Patriots: https://bit.ly/4bpz1aw