What Kendrick Bourne’s Season-Ending Injury Means For Patriots

What happens when one of the NFL’s worst passing attacks loses its most productive pass-catcher? The Patriots are about to find out.

Day-after tests reportedly revealed the knee injury Kendrick Bourne suffered during Sunday’s loss to the Miami Dolphins was a torn ACL. He’ll miss the rest of the season, leaving New England with a receiving corps that might be the NFL’s weakest.

The injury comes at a cruel time for Bourne, who was on pace for career highs in all three receiving categories through eight games. The 28-year-old successfully rebounded from his forgettable, Matt Patricia-marred 2022 campaign and was playing some of the best football of his career. ESPN Analytics Bourne ranked as the league’s 11th-best receiver entering Sunday’s games.

This bounce-back followed an offseason in which Bourne overhauled his approach to training and made what position coach Troy Brown recently called “a 180 with his personal life.”

“That’s the biggest thing,” Brown said last week. “But KB as a football player, he’s KB. He loves football. He loves being out there, he loves practicing and he loves playing. You can see when he’s dancing around the field and all the stuff that he does. He brings a lot of energy to our football team.”

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Unfortunately for Bourne, he won’t be back on the field until spring at the earliest. ESPN’s Mike Reiss set the expected timetable for his return at six to eight months, meaning Bourne will likely miss at least part of the 2024 offseason program and could be sidelined until training camp. Whether Bourne will still be with the Patriots at that point is another conversation, as he’s in the final year of his contract and was rumored as a possible deadline trade candidate before his injury.

In the meantime, New England will need to find a way to replace both the energy Brown mentioned and Bourne’s on-field production, which nearly outpaced the combined output of all of his fellow Patriots wideouts.

Bourne totaled 37 catches for 406 yards and four touchdowns before the awkward sideline tackle that ended his season. None of those marks rank near the top of the NFL, but all three lead the Patriots by hefty margins.

How hefty? Running back Rhamondre Stevenson ranks second on the team with 25 receptions and tight end Hunter Henry is runner-up in yards and touchdowns with 238 and two. Every non-Bourne member of New England’s receiving corps combined has 52 catches for 488 yards and one touchdown entering this Sunday’s Week 9 matchup with the Washington Commanders.

A breakdown:

Demario Douglas: 30 targets, 19 catches, 222 yards
DeVante Parker: 25 targets, 15 catches, 158 yards
JuJu Smith-Schuster: 26 targets, 15 catches, 89 yards, touchdown
Jalen Reagor: three targets, one catch, 11 yards
Tyquan Thornton: three targets, two catches, 8 yards
Kayshon Boutte: four targets, zero catches

For context, 22 NFL pass-catchers (21 wideouts and Travis Kelce) have more receiving yards by themselves than that uninspiring sextet has in total. Tyreek Hill has more than twice as many. Among those 22: DeAndre Hopkins, who has 504 yards for Tennessee after the Patriots passed on a chance to sign him this offseason.

In New England’s current group, the only player with real promise is Douglas, who recently took over as New England slot receiver and already is drawing extra attention from opposing defenses. Reagor is trending upward, as well, as evidenced by last week’s promotion from the practice squad, but the 2020 first-round pick now has played 70 snaps for the Patriots and caught just one pass.

As for the rest? Parker had one reception in each of his last three games, hasn’t topped 35 receiving yards since his season debut and likely will miss at least this week with a concussion after taking a helmet-to-helmet hit against Miami.

Smith-Schuster has been a massive free agency flop. The player he was signed to replace, Jakobi Meyers, has more than twice as many receptions and more than quadruple the yards for the Las Vegas Raiders. Smith-Schuster didn’t see the field Sunday until after Parker and Bourne both suffered their injuries, playing his first snap with 13:47 remaining in the fourth quarter.

The only wideouts beneath Smith-Schuster on the depth chart were Thornton and Boutte, who both were healthy inactives Sunday. Eighteen months after the Patriots traded up to draft him in the second round, Thornton has as many healthy scratches (one) as games with 50-plus receiving yards, and nearly as many injured reserve stints (two) as games with more than two receptions (three).

What will the next 10 weeks hold for this unit? Losing Bourne likely will mean even more snaps and targets for Douglas, who set career highs in both in the loss to the Dolphins. But for all the very real potential the shifty Liberty product has shown, his overall numbers have been modest, and that’s with opponents only recently starting to zero in on him.

Douglas’ five catches against Miami totaled just 25 yards, and bottling him up now will be a priority for every defense the Patriots face. There could be some tough sledding ahead for the 5-foot-8 playmaker.

Before the Patriots even play their next game, they should see if they can find any takers for Smith-Schuster, Parker or Thornton ahead of Tuesday’s trade deadline. They’re unlikely to get anything of value for any of the three, but even offloading Smith-Schuster’s or Parker’s contract would be a win at this point. And there might be a team willing to take a flier on Thornton’s speed, though it doesn’t help that most draft analysts expected him to be taken several rounds later than he was.

Down the road, it would make sense for the Patriots to give Boutte some run and see what they have in the former LSU phenom, though Bill Belichick’s lukewarm comments suggest he is not impressing behind the scenes.

Regardless of which approach they take, removing Bourne from the equation is a gut punch for the Patriots’ offense. Barring an unlikely midseason renaissance from Parker or Smith-Schuster or a full-blown star turn from Douglas, it’s hard to see this receiving corps being anything other than downright bad moving forward, which will make life all the more difficult for quarterback Mac Jones.

Even with Bourne, the Patriots’ offense came out of Week 8 ranked 26th in yards per pass attempt, 26th in success rate per dropback and 29th in expected points added per dropback, ahead of only the New York Giants, Cleveland Browns and New York Jets.