Tom Brady says Julian Edelman is ‘too good of a player’ to simply replace
Another week, another injury.
Next man up?
Well, not exactly.
Patriots receiver Julian Edelman suffered a broken foot in New England’s 27-26 win over the New York Giants, and will miss a significant portion, if not all, of the regular season. On WEEI’s The Dennis and Callahan Show Monday,Tom Brady addressed how the injury will affect the Patriots offense.
“There’s nothing that’s really seamless when you lose a great player,’’ Brady said. “When someone that’s been the leading receiver on your team for multiple years and you lose him, it’s not like you go, ‘OK, well let’s just put someone else in.’ He’s too good of a player for that. You just got to kind of find a way to make some adjustments, and I think we just made some critical plays when we needed to which was really important down the stretch. Certainly defensively and special teams we did, and offensively I thought we just did enough.’’
Brady has targetted Edelman 88 times for 66 catches, eighth-most in the NFL. He’s also got the ninth-most first down receptions with 37. Edelman has caught 327 receptions over his seven years with the Patriots, almost all of which were thrown by Brady — they have strong chemistry.
“That’s kind of the challenging part about football,’’ Brady said. “Kind of when we lost Seabass [Sebastian Vollmer] last week, you have all these things on the call sheet that you’re kind of ready for and you plan for, and when someone is really integral to basically everything you’re doing, and you lose that person, it may take a little bit to kind of figure out how you can move things around and get comfortable with what you’re doing because you want to have a lot of confidence in the things that you’re doing. That’s just the way kind of it is.’’
The Patriots will look to their depth at the receiver position to help fill the void in the offense. Against the Giants, Danny Amendola took center stage, and caught 10 of his 11 targets for 79 yards.
“Keshawn Martin is still obviously a good player for us and is hopefully coming back here soon,’’ Brady said. “And I’ve got a lot of confidence in Brandon LaFell. Danny (Amendola)’s role has been very different than Julian’s was for us. I just think they’re a little different type of players. And certainly Julian has been incredible for us. Incredible. And Danny’s had just a great year this year, and really continued from the way he finished last season. It’s kind of like when you lose a great player like Dion Lewis, there’s different ways you’re going to need to produce. We’ll need to find different ways to produce with the guys that are on the field.’’
During the Patriots’ Week 10 matchup with the Redskins, Lewis tore his ACL. The running back was a major presence catching and running the football and in pass protection.
“I’m happy we got the win in the meantime. I think that’s really important, because you go on the road against a good team, you play really hard, you lose a critical player and you still find a way to win,’’ said Brady. “I think it says a lot about your team.’’
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