The Season Starts Tomorrow And New England Brought A Brand New Offense To Seattle

Folks, it is over. The waiting, the depth chart archaeology, the practice reports written by men in folding chairs. Football is tomorrow night, and the league has done us the favour of opening with the best possible sentence: the reigning champions host the team they beat in the Super Bowl.

Seattle hosts New England on Wednesday in a rematch of Super Bowl LX. And the Patriots are arriving with an offense that did not exist the last time these two teams shared a field.

They Went And Got Drake Maye Some People

A.J. Brown is a Patriot. So is Romeo Doubs. New England spent the offseason doing the single most obvious thing in football and one that roughly half the league refuses to do, which is buy weapons for a young quarterback while he is still cheap.

I have been banging this drum since the spring. A quarterback on a rookie contract is the only window in the modern sport where a team can afford to be genuinely aggressive, and most of them spend it politely. Mike Vrabel did not spend it politely. He went and got a receiver who has been a legitimate WR1 in two different offenses and paired him with a complementary body who knows how to win on the third option.

You cannot evaluate a young quarterback until you have stopped punishing him. New England stopped punishing him.

And I want to flag one thing the discourse has largely skipped. A.J. Brown missing time in August is not the story. He is expected to play Wednesday. Some of you saw a headline about a Brown ruled out with a knee this week and got nervous — that was Ben Brown, an offensive lineman who did not make the trip. Different man, different position. Check the first name before you trade anybody.

Now The Part That Is Actually Undecided

TreVeyon Henderson hurt his ankle on August 24 and the situation is still not resolved three days out.

He has not been ruled out. He was listed as limited on Monday's report, which is the first real activity in a while. But he has largely been absent from practice since the injury, the reporting has turned discouraging rather than encouraging, and ESPN has published an entire piece on what New England does without him. Teams do not commission that article about a player they expect to have.

If he is out, Rhamondre Stevenson steps into the lead role, and Stevenson is not a fill-in — he is a man who has carried a backfield before and knows exactly what to do with the work.

How I Am Playing All Of It

1. Start A.J. Brown with total confidence. New offense, new quarterback, a defense that will roll coverage toward him and still lose the rep occasionally. He is expected to play. That is enough for me.
2. Do not start Henderson until he is confirmed active. A second-year back returning from a two-week ankle absence into a road opener against the champions is a Week 1 you cannot get back.
3. Stevenson is the better play this week and he is free in most leagues. If Henderson sits, Stevenson is a top-twenty back for a week. If Henderson plays limited, Stevenson is still getting the tough carries.
4. Drake Maye is a genuine streaming quarterback, and I say that as somebody constitutionally allergic to streaming quarterbacks. The weapons are real and the game script in Seattle probably forces throwing.

One Word About Seattle

Everybody is going to spend tomorrow talking about New England's shiny new receivers, and I have just spent six paragraphs doing exactly that. So let me say the obvious thing that the champions have earned: they won it. They are at home, they have the crowd, and the last time these teams played, one of them was holding a trophy at the end.

A brand new receiving corps in the loudest building in the sport, in the first game any of them have played together that counted, is precisely the setting where a beautiful offseason plan looks clumsy for three quarters. I am starting my guys anyway. I have simply learned to hold the optimism at arm's length until somebody has actually completed a pass.