From the outside looking in, the right tackle position has appeared to be a problem for the Patriots through the first two weeks of regular season action.
Veteran starter Trent Brown went down with a calf injury in the first quarter of the season opener against Miami and was inactive for Sunday’s win in New York.
With Brown out against Miami, second-year former sixth-round pick Justin Herron initially took over the right tackle spot and appeared to struggle a bit before being replaced by late-summer roster addition Yasir Durant, a 2020 undrafted rookie with Kansas City.
This week, against the Jets, Durant made his first-career start at right tackle. He also seemed to struggle before being replaced by Herron. The two players almost evenly split the game’s right tackle reps in the win that saw Mac Jones get sacked three times, including a strip sack on which Durant was fortunate to recover the fumble in the second quarter.
During his Monday morning Zoom call with local reporters, Bill Belichick was asked if he’s concerned about his team’s play at right tackle. Interestingly, Belichick responded with a rather upbeat assessment of the spot.
“I still need to spend a little more time here going through the film and talking about things, but I think we’re all right here,” Belichick said. “We’ve got three players that have played it and I think they’ve all done some good things. Trent, I mean not very much in the last two games, but we know Trent can do a good job over there. Yasir and Justin have both done a solid job there. We’ve had some breakdowns at really all spots on the line, all spots offensively. It’s just we’ve lacked some consistency, even though we’ve had a lot of good plays and moved the ball and we’ve put ourselves into positive field position a lot of times this year, we just don’t have enough results points wise, what we feel like we should have. But I think that’s really a whole team thing, not any one individual or one guy. So we planned to play both Justin and Yasir yesterday, we did. They both got some good experience. And they both had a lot of good plays. So we’ll see where we are this week and go from there.”
Brown missed practice last week due to the calf on both Wednesday and Thursday before returning on a limited basis on Friday. If he can’t go this again this week, it sounds like Belichick is comfortable with the contributions he’s getting from Herron and Durant.
One thing the Patriots have not done yet is move second-year left guard Mike Onwenu out to the right tackle spot where he started 10 games as an impressive fifth-round rookie a year ago. Belichick actually ignored the portion of a reporter’s question Monday morning wondering if the team had considered bumping Onwenu back outside.
