Patriots running back Rhamondre Stevenson scored a touchdown in Sunday’s win over the Titans, but that doesn’t mean Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel was happy about it.
In a video posted on the Patriots’ social media channels, Vrabel went over some of the key plays from Sunday’s win, and when he got to Stevenson’s touchdown, he showed Stevenson starting to hold the ball out before crossing the goal line. Vrabel said, “What we can’t do is we can’t do this.”
Vrabel knows that multiple players have cost their teams touchdowns this season by dropping the ball before crossing the goal line, and he said he won’t tolerate it happening in New England.
“We can’t sit there and be careless with the ball. We’re not gonna see it anymore. We’re not gonna start doing this. We’re not gonna become a team that gives the other team an advantage,” Vrabel said. “We need to make sure that we’re securing the football.”
That’s a message that every coach has to get across to his team. It should have been a message that every NFL player knew after Colts wide receiver Adonai Mitchell cost himself a touchdown by fumbling at the 1-yard line in a Week Four loss to the Rams, but the message clearly didn’t get through to everyone because in Week Five, Cardinals running back Emari Demercado did the same thing, fumbling away what would have been a game-clinching touchdown at the 1-yard line in a loss to the Titans.
Stevenson apparently hadn’t gotten the message yet either. Vrabel says every single Patriot gets it now.
Drafted in 2024, Patriots quarterback Drake Maye has only 19 career starts. In more than 25 percent of them, he has completed more than 80 percent of his pass attempts.
Maye has five career games with a completion percentage of 80 or higher. Via NBC Sports research, that’s more than any player in league history through his first two seasons, with a minimum of 15 attempts per game.
Maye has done it in three of seven games this year, including last week’s franchise single-game record of 91.3 percent. He did it twice as a rookie.
And Maye has ten more regular-season games in 2025. At his current rate, Maye will get another three or four in which he completes at least four of every five passes, pushing the record through two seasons as high as eight or nine games.
For the year, Maye’s completion percentage is 75.2. Lions quarterback Jared Goff is second, at 74.9 percent. Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott (71.4 percent) and Colts quarterback Daniel Jones (71.0) percent are the only others at 70 percent or higher.
The Patriots have just one player with an injury designation for Sunday’s game against the Browns.
Kyle Dugger is questionable with a knee injury.
Dugger was added to the injury report on Thursday as a limited participant.
After starting the first two games of the season, Dugger moved back into a starting role for Week 6. He’s played 100 percent of New England’s defensive snaps in each of the last two games. In all, Dugger has recorded 17 total tackles in 2025.
After missing last week’s win over the Dolphins, Browns tight end David Njoku may be back to face the Patriots on Sunday.
Njoku is officially questionable for Week 8 with a knee injury, Cleveland announced.
Njoku was limited for the week’s first two practices.
The veteran tight end has 23 receptions for 223 yards with a touchdown so far this season.
Defensive tackle Adin Huntington (concussion) is the only other Browns player with a game status, as he’s questionable.
Head coach Kevin Stefanski noted in his press conference that defensive tackle Mike Hall Jr. will make his season debut after recovering from a season-ending knee injury suffered last December. Hall’s injury required two different surgeries.
Right tackle Jack Conklin is also set to return after being sidelined by a concussion.
As the North Carolina football program has struggled, despite being the self-styled “33rd NFL team,” more attention has been devoted to the person who accumulated the players who, in most games, have simply not been good enough: General Manager Mike Lombardi.
Sufficient attention has been directed to Lombardi to put him on the one radar screen everyone in pro and college sports currently hopes to avoid. The one monitored by Pablo Torre.
The latest episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out focuses on Lombardi’s NFL credentials.
We’ll defer to the full episode for all relevant details of the deep dive performed by Torre and David Fleming. There are three major takeaways to be shared here.
First, Lombardi loves to quote the late Bill Walsh. In his book, Gridiron Genius, Lombardi creates the impression that he was essentially Walsh’s right-hand man. Walsh’s son, Craig, said this to Pablo Torre Finds Out: “He was just there in a very, very limited role. I don’t think he really had any personal contact with Bill outside of seeing him in a hallway, or sitting in the back of a meeting. . . . He might have been like the gofer/chauffeur, pick him up here. In fact, that does kind of ring a bell. You know, that this is your entryway into it, to get to wear a 49ers shirt. But that’s about as far as it goes. . . . I’ll jump on the wagon a little bit, just because I don’t like him using the fact that he was part of the 49ers organization when all he did was go get sandwiches.”
Second, Lombardi has claimed he left his job with the Patriots to write Gridiron Genius. According to Pablo Torre Finds Out, however, Lombardi was fired amid a near mutiny within the Patriots’ staff, with complaints about Lombardi coming from offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels, defensive coordinator Matt Patricia, director of player personnel Nick Caserio, director of football/head coach administration Berj Najarian, and director of football research Ernie Adams, among others. Specifically, when Lombardi’s contract with the Patriots expired after the 2016 draft, owner Robert Kraft told coach Bill Belichick (who had full control over the football operation) that Lombardi had to go.
Third, Lombardi calls himself a three-time Super Bowl winner. Craig Walsh told Pablo Torre Finds Out, however, that Lombardi did not receive a Super Bowl ring from the 49ers for the 1984 season. “Did he get a ring?” Craig Walsh said. “No. . . . He might have got a Balfour pendant.” (Lombardi, through North Carolina P.R., declined to comment.) Also, Pablo Torre Finds Out reports that Lombardi did not receive an official Super Bowl ring from the Patriots for the 2016 season, because he was fired after the 2016 draft. Instead, Belichick personally bought a friends-and-family-level ring for Lombardi after the Patriots won Super Bowl LI. (Lombardi, through North Carolina P.R., declined to comment.)
So the self-described three-time Super Bowl-winning strategist actually has won only one Super Bowl ring that was issued to him by the team that won the Super Bowl. Not three.
