Henderson’s role keeps shrinking, and Vrabel didn’t say much about why

The bottom line: TreVeyon Henderson played 13 of New England’s 54 offensive snaps in Thursday’s 30-24 loss at Chicago and ran three times for nine yards. Asked afterward whether the second-year running back’s shrinking workload was about game flow, injury or performance, Mike Vrabel pointed to packages and to a look at Corey Kiner. Henderson’s snap share has been falling since Week 2, and the numbers underneath it have fallen too.

Thursday: 13 snaps, three carries, and a non-answer

The bottom line: Henderson was on the field for 13 snaps, 24 percent of the offense’s total, in the 30-24 loss at Soldier Field, which snapped a three-game winning streak. It was the second straight week he had no role in the fourth quarter of an undecided game, the Boston Globe’s Nicole Yang reported.

The details:

• Henderson ran three times for nine yards and caught two passes for 14 yards. His last carry came midway through the third quarter.
• Rhamondre Stevenson played 37 snaps, 69 percent, and ran six times for 22 yards. He caught five passes for a career-high 93 yards, 48 of them on a touchdown at the end of the first half. He also played an important part in blitz pickup, Yang wrote.
• Kiner played six snaps and ran four times for 13 yards.
• New England gained 70 total yards on the ground. Drake Maye led the team in rushing, scrambling four times for 26 yards and a touchdown.
• The offense ran a season-low 54 snaps, about 14 fewer than its season average, per Yang.

What Vrabel said. Asked whether the diminishing workload was the result of game flow, injury or performance, Vrabel did not have much to say, Yang reported:

“We had some things for him, packages or personnel groupings,” Vrabel said. “TreVeyon will help us, but I wanted to see where we were with Corey [Kiner] getting a couple carries, too. But TreVeyon will help us plenty here down the stretch and helped us a little bit tonight.”

On the run game as a whole: “Offensive productivity is we didn’t run the ball well enough, but we moved it however we needed to move it, which sometimes you’re going to have days like that,” Vrabel said of the rushing attack. “I thought we’d be able to run it a little better than we did it. But then our best player is putting the ball in good spots most of the time and making good decisions.”

The slide started before the ankle

The bottom line: Henderson averaged 28 snaps per game in his first three games of the season and 14.5 in the past two he has played from start to finish, ESPN’s Mike Reiss reported. Reiss traces part of the decline to the ankle injury Henderson sustained against the Raiders on Oct. 11. Yang’s week-by-week accounting has his snap share falling from Week 2, before that injury.

The week by week, per Yang:

• Week 2 against Pittsburgh was the peak: 60 percent of the offense’s snaps, and he got there because Stevenson fumbled in the first quarter.
• He then played 37 percent of the snaps in back-to-back games before his playing time dropped further.
• Week 5 against Las Vegas: 12 snaps, cut short when he exited with the ankle injury.
• Week 6 against the Jets: 16 snaps, in a game Yang reported he was unexpectedly able to play.
• Week 7 at Chicago: 13 snaps.

Henderson went into Thursday night a full participant in practice with no game designation, Yang reported.

Through seven games, Stevenson leads New England’s running backs with 64 percent of the snaps, ahead of Henderson at 27 percent and Kiner at 12 percent, according to Reiss.

What the tape and the charting say

The bottom line: Henderson’s only explosive play this season is a 39-yard touchdown in Week 2. Over six games he has 203 yards on 52 carries, and with that run removed he is averaging 3.2 rushing yards per attempt, Boston.com’s Conor Ryan calculated in a commentary piece.

The details:

• His next longest play after that 39-yard score is 11 yards. He is averaging 1.6 yards after contact and has broken zero tackles, per Pro Football Reference, Yang reported.
• Pass protection, billed as a strength coming out of college, has not followed him. PFF graded him 16.4 as a pass blocker against the Bears, and Ryan wrote that Henderson failed to pick up a fourth-quarter Chicago blitz that swarmed Maye and forced a punt.
• On a first-quarter carry, Ryan wrote, a gap opened between Jared Wilson and Walter Rouse and Henderson ran through it and spun right into a Bears defender for a five-yard pickup. Doug Kyed of the Boston Herald timed the sequence: “This TreVeyon Henderson carry came with 9:12 left in the first quarter. He didn’t touch the ball again until there was 7:36 left in the third quarter.”
• “He needs to sit down and watch Kenneth Walker, he really does,” Patriots great Troy Brown said of Henderson on the Patriots.com postgame show. “I said it a few weeks ago, just show him tape of guys who are patient and teams that run those duo plays that they have him run a lot and just have the patience to be able to let the blocks develop and then make those defensive lineman stick their head either in the A-gap or B-gap or whatever it is and you go the opposite way. He’s just too fast and he reacts to things too fast.”

The backdrop: New England took Henderson with the 38th pick in the 2025 NFL Draft, and his collegiate profile had him projected as an elite pass blocker and a reliable receiving threat, Ryan wrote. As a rookie last season he scored four rushing touchdowns of more than 50 yards and finished with 911 yards, per Yang.

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Our take

Vrabel says packages and personnel groupings. The charting says something harder to coach around: Henderson graded 16.4 as a pass blocker on a night a fourth-quarter blitz got through to Maye, while Stevenson handled blitz pickup and caught five balls for 93 yards. Henderson came in projected as an elite pass blocker. Put that next to two straight weeks with no role in the fourth quarter of an undecided game and the “packages” answer gets thin. The other tell is Kiner, who took six snaps and four carries for 13 yards. Vrabel said he wanted to see where he was with that. He already knows where he is with Henderson.