Through five games of his sophomore season, former first-round Patriots wide receiver N’Keal Harry has already played more snaps than he did in the entirety of his 2019 rookie campaign.
Harry has logged 266 snaps this fall compared to the 220 snaps he saw in final seven games of last season after missing the first portion of the year on IR.
The extra work has led to incrementally more production. Harry has 18 catches for 166 yards and a touchdown in the first five games of 2020 compared to 12 catches for 105 yards and two scores in seven games a year ago. The receiver was, though, shut out in last Sunday’s loss to the Broncos, failing to connect on either Cam Newton pass thrown his way. One led to an interception, the other fell incomplete to the turf on New England’s final fourth-down offensive play of the day.
During his Wednesday morning video call, Patriots head coach Bill Belichick was asked about the way Harry has taken advantage of his expanded oppournity this year.
“Well, as a team we need more time on the practice field than we’ve had recently,” Belichick said, continuing to lament the practice time the Patriots lost over the last couple weeks to COVID-19 positive tests and concerns. “Hopefully we’ll start getting that this week and that will be good for all of us. I think we all need to work on fundamentals and awareness and anticipation and things like that. So that’s true of every position. Obviously in the passing game the quarterbacks, receivers, backs, tight ends, there’s a lot of that. We need it on defense as well, defensive recognition. That’s something that I’d say we’re all maybe not starting all over but we need a lot of work on that. So I think we’ve made some gains but we need to do more on the field so hopefully we’ll be able to do that this week.”
Belichick did end his answer with comments specific to the actual question about Harry, who was by rule not allowed to practice or play at this time a year ago while on IR.
“So that’s N’Keal, that’s everybody. He’s way ahead of where he was last year because he’s been on the field and he’s been practicing. There was a point in time where we had strung together a lot of quality reps. We need to do that again,” Belichick concluded.
