I don't know that Jonnu will every be a top TE, but I do think next year they'll design more stuff to get him in space. He's always been known as a YAC guy, and his YAC/R was ridiculously good this year. I would guess that with basically all-new pass catchers and a rookie QB, implementing designed stuff for him wasn't a priority, but going into next year I would hope to see Josh making more plays designed to get him in space and let him work.
The Patriots completed the 17th most passes in the NFL this year (so smack dab in the middle) with 364. But there's only one ball to go around. Those 364 are going to be divided up somehow. The Pats attempted the 25th most passes (535), so it's not like they tried to throw more but were unsuccessful. The ran 1052 plays on the year (61.9 per game), and the average team ran 1076 plays on the year (63.3 per game), so a little under one and a half more plays per game than the Patriots. Baltimore ran 1185 plays (most in the NFL), or 69.7 per game), so 8 more per game than the Pats.
So the Pats picked up a bunch of new players - Agholor, Bourne, Henry, and Jonnu, to go along with Stevenson as a draftee. Add them to their existing players in Meyers, Harry, Harris, Bolden, and White. You're going to divide up those touches between all those guys. If you spread it out evenly, nobody is going to have big numbers and we can say they were a "bust" or had a "down" year. If you give some guys a ton of touches, yay they had a big year, but other guys are going to look like they were completely unproductive.
It's ok for individual guys to have less personal production if their presence still helps the overall offense. You can't add all those new guys and reasonably expect that they would all be big producers. That's not how it works. Or if they were, then we'd be like, what the heck happened to Meyers and Harris?
And if White was available all year, these other guys' production would have been even "worse" because he'd have taken a bunch of those touches.
And yet the offense produced:
- The 15th most yards
- The 9th most first downs
- The 2nd most drives that resulted in a score
- The 9th most expected points
- The 6th most points scored
This isn't to say that everyone played well. And sometimes numbers do tell the story. But on the whole, the Patriots' offense was solid, and these guys all played a part in it being solid.