Burkhead Making A Strong Impression in New England

[XenoMorph]

(06-09-2017, 01:09 PM)3wt Wrote: http://www.bostonherald.com/sports/patriots/2017/06/rex_burkhead_making_a_strong_impression_at_patriots_minicamp

Interesting article.  Easy to have a knee jerk reaction in a variety of perspectives.  Here's my perspective:

• A pretty condescending article whose author kept pushing Rex to share the differences in playing for the Bengals and the Patriots - which, being the class act he is he never did.   The author even said at one point that Rex - in response to the question of those differences - said something very telling.  And he said nothing that was telling about the differences.  It was only telling about his positive response to working in the rain.
  

• The author also underscored how many ways the Pats plan to utilize him, inferring that the Bengals did not use him in that variety of ways which I think is patronizingly inaccurate, creating the idea that we did not know all the ways to employ Rex.  
  

• I think the Bengals did use him in a variety of ways.   I just think we did not use him nearly enough.   I understand we had Jeremy and Gio - 2 pretty good backs.  But we did not pull the trigger nearly soon enough when Jeremy was injured and was not playing well.  And before Peerman was hurt we would use Ced way before we would resort to Rex - which I thought was just plain stupid.  Rex was clearly the better running back.
  

• It would have been good to keep Burkhead here.  I know, he would have been a high priced backup to Mixon and would be directly fighting Jeremy or Peerman (maybe both) for a roster spot.  But, even if he was not the STs stud that Peerman is, he was still a very good STs player, he was a stud Swiss army knife multi-tool, he was reliable, tough and he was a team player and very high character guy.  In my opinion he was the better keep than either Jeremy or Ced - and a better blocker than both.
  

Bottom line, the article is misleading and very patronizing.   But I still think we made a mistake letting a guy like that go.  You can never have enough players of his quality.

really liked burkhead... And I agree we did not use him as much as we probly should have... This guy played WR for us when we ran out  played pretty good at RB any time we put him in.     Hue used him better than zampese did.      But generally most 3rd/4th stringers @ RB don't see the field often.

Ive never really been a fan of how we rotate backs here though...