Stevenson Is Down, and New England's Backup Plan Just Became the Whole Plan
The number that reframes everything is 820. That's how many rushing yards Rhamondre Stevenson produced last season across 18 games — a volume that made him the reliable second punch in a backfield that also featured TreVeyon Henderson's 987 yards. Together they gave New England something rare: genuine two-headed threat capability, the kind that lets an offense stay on schedule even when the passing game stalls. Lose one of them in a normal week and you adjust. Lose one of them the same week Drake Maye is sidelined and Tommy DeVito is taking snaps against Buffalo, and you're not adjusting anymore. You're improvising.
What the depth chart shows behind Stevenson is Corey Kiner and Lan Larison. Neither has a statistical footprint in this grounding that suggests they can carry a game-plan load. Henderson remains the anchor — his 987 yards and nine touchdowns last season are the one reliable number left in this backfield — but leaning exclusively on him while DeVito manages the offense is a structural problem, not just a personnel inconvenience. Henderson is a featured back when the offense around him is humming. He becomes a liability if defenses know he's the only credible threat and can pin their ears back against a backup quarterback.
The context here matters beyond this week. The beat has been tracking a slow unraveling of the offensive infrastructure for the better part of two weeks. The guard room collapsed first — Van Roten to IR, Jake Kubas stepping into a starting role the team never planned for him. Then Maye's shoulder became the headline. Now Stevenson. Each individual injury was survivable. The accumulation is something different. What made New England's offense work last season was redundancy: if one piece slipped, another absorbed the load. That redundancy is being stripped away piece by piece.
The running back fragility, it's worth noting, was a known quantity before any of this happened. The beat narrative coming out of training camp flagged it explicitly — the depth behind the starters was thin, and Reggie Gilliam's production numbers as a nominal contributor were well below what you'd want from a functional third option. The franchise addressed many of its offseason needs aggressively, from signing Dre'Mont Jones on the edge to pursuing Christian Gonzalez's record extension in the secondary. The backfield depth? It stayed thin. That calculation looked manageable when Maye was healthy and the line was intact. It looks considerably more exposed right now.
My read is that the Patriots' most urgent question this week isn't whether DeVito can manage the game — it's whether Henderson can be protected from an unsustainable workload. The 2025 season also showed that New England went just 7-3 in one-score games, underperforming their overall win rate in exactly the tight, execution-dependent situations that a depleted offense tends to produce. DeVito starting, Stevenson out, and a thin backfield behind Henderson is a recipe for exactly those kinds of grinding, low-margin contests. The box score next week may tell a story the vibe around this team isn't ready to hear.