Rhamondre Stevenson didn’t need a touchdown to leave his mark on the Patriots’ 24-19 win in Miami.
On a rainy day at Hard Rock Stadium, with the Patriots forced to keep leaning on a thin roster, Stevenson gave them the steady presence they needed. He piled up a season-high 82 rushing yards on 19 carries, added three catches for 8 yards, recovered an onside kick in the final minutes, and then helped close it out by grinding out the 5 yards New England needed on third-and-5 from the Miami 38.
That kind of finish mattered in a game that was messy from the start. The Patriots went into halftime trailing 13-3 and had managed only 97 yards of offense in the first half. For a stretch, it looked like this one might settle into the kind of strange, ugly Miami game that has a way of hanging around.
Then Drake Maye changed the shape of it in the third quarter. He hit Kyle Williams for a 43-yard touchdown and followed that with a 2-yard scoring run, using a fake pitch to Stevenson to freeze a defender and open the lane. Suddenly, the Patriots had life.
Stevenson helped set up that momentum, too. He hauled in a low Maye throw for 4 yards on a key third down just before Williams’ long touchdown cut the Dolphins’ lead to 13-10. Later, he finished the job when the game was still hanging in the balance.
The rushing total carried extra weight for Stevenson, who became just the fourth running back in Patriots history to top 4,000 rushing yards for the franchise. Sam Cunningham, Jim Nance, and Tony Collins are the others.
DeMario Douglas also came alive after a quiet first half for the Patriots’ receivers, who had just two catches for 16 yards before the break, both by Efton Chism. Douglas made his presence felt with a fourth-and-2 conversion, a 26-yard catch, and a weaving 48-yard touchdown early in the fourth quarter that pushed New England ahead 24-13.
The defense had its own big moments. Cory Durden and Christian Elliss teamed up to sandwich Dolphins quarterback Malik Willis on the second play from scrimmage, part of a first half that saw the Patriots collect five sacks. Durden added another sack later and finished with two tackles for loss.
Kevin Coleman Jr. provided Miami’s biggest late threat, finishing with three catches and a team-high 46 receiving yards. His 35-yard touchdown reception with 2:04 left cut the Patriots’ lead to 24-19 and added one more tense moment before Stevenson and the offense put the game away.
The officiating crew drew plenty of attention, too. The Alex Moore-led group had already been moved off its original “Sunday Night Football” assignment after last week’s Lions-Packers game, and the Patriots-Dolphins matchup did not exactly improve its reputation. The most obvious miss came on Williams’s touchdown, which was initially ruled incomplete before being overturned.
A few other notes stood out from the broadcast and the box score. Logan Ryan, working as CBS’s color analyst, offered a sharp read on what the Patriots were trying to do and described Stevenson’s missed pickup on Joshua Uche by saying he “left the driveway too early.” The Patriots also snapped Ollie Gordon’s streak of scoring a rushing touchdown in four straight games, and Kevin Byard picked off his first pass as a Patriot and 37th of his career when a Willis throw bounced off DaQuan Jones’s helmet.
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