Hey, all I need to know about Kendrick Bourne is this: With a ROOKIE QB, NEW offense, playing ONLY 30% of. the offensive snaps; he produced 800 yds of passing yds. So if he gets say 50% of the offensive snaps, with a better QB, in an offense he knows a lot better, it isn't a big stretch to predict that Bourne will improve on those offensive numbers.
But here's the thing. Bourne ISN'T going to be the #1 receiver on the Pats which guarantees him 10-15 targets a game. That's the beauty of NOT having one. The defense cannot load up the defense on any one receiver. The Pats have at least 4 proven NFL quality WR's, 2 legitimate TE targets. 3 solid RB targets including (health willing) one who is among the greatest 3rd down RB's in the history of the game. Maybe a little hyperbole in that last sentence, but White certainly helped define the role of "3rd down RB" over the last decade.
The Pats look like they have a QB who is smart enough to deal with a game specific offense that will try and exploit match ups created by formations, motions and play calling to gain advantages each week. In that kind of offense when you don't have to force feed a #1, A guy like Bourne will get say just 5-10 targets a game and your QB is likely to have UNDER 30 attempts/game than over. This will again be a run first offense or at least running it 45-50% of the time a game. The key to the Pats passing offense will be how EFFECTIVE it will been helping them move the sticks, reduce TO's and score points.
In an offense like that, individual stats are diminished (except in fantasy football) because you try your best to create as many redundancies into the personnel so the offense doesn't become bogged down when the inevitable injuries occur. Of course most of the back ups WON'T be as good as the starters, but they have to be good enough to fill in their spots AND be somewhat productive. For example if Bourne goes down for a couple of games, I'm confident a guy like Meyers would be an adequate fill in. If Agular goes down, I'd like to think Thornton could fill in as a plus talent, but with a rookie's inexperience. If Parker went down, I'd like to think one of our TE's could fill the need for having a big receiver in the mix.
TC will actually decide how those roles will ACTUALLY be filled, I only used those names to help paint the picture of what the Pats offense has successfully accomplished for most of the 2 decades with Brady where he had a true #1 for only 2 years.
Listen and get used to it. The mediots will look at whatever the roster ends up to be and determine that the Pats will rank around 15-20 in relative talent compared to their peers. But that is INDIVIDUAL talent, and we should all know by now that in the game of football the sum is often GREATER than the individual parts, because football, in the end, still IS the greatest TEAM sport.
Somewhere along the line the mediots started to make it ALL about the individual stars and highlight plays and soon it wasn't about the Pats vs Colts, but rather Brady vs Manning, AND eventually we bought it,
Remember back in the early days of the first dynasty when other fans and a lot of us would go to the each other's boards and do the comparative of how we match up at TE, LT, LG, etc game. Within a few years we stopped doing that game (which I was happy, though having fans of other teams come to our board and us going to theirs without trolling is something I miss). The reason we stopped is we all realized that those sorts of INDIVIDUAL comparisons were meaningless to start with. Yet now we are falling back into that myth. Ryan Clark says Miami's talent is better than ours and we have to start a long thread about it shouldn't have gone on for more than a page.
In the end it will ALWAYS be on a given Sunday, which TEAM is better, NOT what the individual talent is one deep.
