Patriots WR Kendrick Bourne calls out third-down offensive execution
New England Patriots wide receiver Kendrick Bourne had some critiques for the offense following the team’s 24-10 loss to the Buffalo Bills on Thursday night.
The New England passing attack managed just 195 passing yards, while the ground game was limited to 60 yards in the game. Bourne caught one pass for 15 yards on two targets on a night when the Patriots failed to spread the ball down the field.
Quarterback Mac Jones was upset with the Patriots’ passing attack as well, and he echoed those sentiments on the sideline. New England’s leading receiver was rookie cornerback Marcus Jones, which says a lot about the unit’s struggles.
There were especially issues for the team converting on third down, as Bourne alluded to the media after the game.
“We just need to scheme up better,” said Bourne, via NESN’s Zach Cox. “We need to know what they’re doing. We need to know what they want to do on third down, you know what I mean? We’re kind of sporadic. They call this and we call that and it falls into what they want. We need to have it where they’re falling into what we want. That’s not my job. It’s my job to just run the call.
“But as we all could see, they had, what, 30 first downs? And we only had eight. So something they were doing against us was working, and something we were doing against them wasn’t working. It’s just about figuring it out each week. We’ve still got life, but we need to hurry up and figure it out.”
New England struggled to get things going consistently on offense Thursday night. They went 3-for-12 on third down, and the offense did not show stability until the later stages of the game.
In the meantime, Buffalo put on a clinic offensively. Josh Allen went 22-of-33 passing for 223 yards, and wide receiver Stefon Diggs caught seven passes for 92 yards.
The Patriots, on the other hand, have continued to sputter offensively, and they are quickly running out of time to fix it.
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