There’s no shortage of belief around TreVeyon Henderson’s talent in New England. The Patriots saw a player with real home-run juice when they used the 38th pick in the 2025 NFL Draft, and the appeal was obvious: straight-line speed, big-play ability, and the kind of receiving and pass-blocking profile that can make life easier for Drake Maye.
But six games into the 2026 season, the production hasn’t matched the promise.
Henderson has just one run of more than 15 yards all year, and that came on a 39-yard touchdown against the Steelers in Week 2. Outside of that burst, the gains have been modest and the misses have been hard to ignore.
Through six games, he has 203 yards on 52 carries. Strip out that long touchdown and he’s sitting at 164 yards on 51 rushes, good for 3.2 yards per carry.
Thursday night against Chicago was another quiet showing. Henderson was on the field for only 13 snaps in the loss, finishing with nine yards on three carries and two catches for 14 yards. The Patriots, meanwhile, ran into a broader offensive slog, putting up only 70 rushing yards as a team and struggling to stay ahead of the sticks on third down.
New England’s offense never really found a rhythm, in part because the Bears kept forcing uncomfortable passing situations. The Patriots played only 54 offensive snaps, their fewest of the season, and the lack of a consistent ground game made life tougher on Maye when Chicago started bringing extra pressure.
Mike Vrabel pointed to the run game after the loss.
“Offensive productivity is we didn’t run the ball well enough, but we moved it however we needed to move it, which sometimes you’re going to have days like that,” Mike Vrabel said of New England’s rushing game. “I thought we’d be able to run it a little better than we did it.
But then our best player is putting the ball in good spots most of the time and making good decisions. So, that’s how it goes.
You’d like to move the ball a little better, but [it] didn’t happen.”
The most frustrating part for the Patriots is that Henderson’s downside has shown up in exactly the areas where he was supposed to help. He has the speed to flip a game, but too often the play ends before he can get rolling.
On one first-quarter run, the blocking opened a clear lane, but Henderson ran straight into a Bears defender and turned a potentially big gain into a five-yard pickup. He then didn’t get back on the field until late in the third quarter.
Doug Kyed of the Boston Herald highlighted that play, and it fit a familiar pattern: the burst is there, but the patience and vision haven’t been.
That concern was echoed after the game by Troy Brown, who compared Henderson’s approach to Kenneth Walker and called for more patience in the backfield.
“He needs to sit down and watch Kenneth Walker, he really does,” Brown said of Henderson on the Patriots.com postgame show. “I said it a few weeks ago, just show him tape of guys who are patient and teams that run those duo plays that they have him run a lot and just have the patience to be able to let the blocks develop and then make those defensive lineman stick their head either in the A-gap or B-gap or whatever it is and you go the opposite way. He’s just too fast and he reacts to things too fast.”
Henderson’s pass protection has been another issue. What was supposed to be a strength from his college profile has not carried over cleanly to the NFL, and PFF gave him a 16.4 pass-blocking grade against the Bears. In the fourth quarter, he missed a blitz pickup that helped Chicago get to Maye and force a punt at a critical moment.
The Patriots are dealing with injuries on offense, and there’s reason to think things can look better as the season goes on. Still, New England needs more from its running game right now, and Henderson is the player with the clearest path to changing that.
So far, though, the explosive back has been ice-cold in 2026.
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TreVeyon Henderson has given the Patriots exactly what they hoped for in terms of burst and explosiveness, but the second-year running back is still running into the same obstacle that has kept him from becoming an every-down option. His pass protection remains a real issue, and because of that, his playing time in obvious passing situations has been limited. For an offense that needs to keep defenses guessing, that creates a problem Mike Vrabel cannot simply scheme around.
The tension for New England is that Henderson's big-play ability is valuable enough to matter, but his blocking shortcomings make the playbook easier to read when he is on the field. The Patriots would like to lean on his speed more often, yet they do not have a clean answer for how to do that without exposing the offense in protection. Until that changes, Henderson's role is going to stay awkwardly split between the impact he can make and the situations the team can trust him in. [Read more 🡒]