After years of rumors and speculation about A.J. Brown joining the Patriots, the star wide receiver finally made his New England debut on Wednesday night in Seattle. It lasted all of 31 minutes.
Brown went down on the opening drive of the second half, suffering a high ankle sprain that landed him on injured reserve on Friday.
The 29-year-old will return this season, but he’ll miss at least the next four games. After that? Patriots insider Phil Perry said there will certainly be some real concern about the type of player Brown is while coming off this injury.
“What does he look like — OK, maybe it’s four weeks, six weeks, whatever. Does he have to get that surgery where you’re reattaching the ligament to the bone? The high ankles are not fun, and they can take a long, long time,” Perry said after ranking his concern level at a 9 out of 10 on the Next Pats Podcast. “I just look at the player himself, and I don’t know, are they going to get the A.J. Brown they thought they were getting for the rest of 2026? And for a guy whose health is such that maybe you looked at him when you acquired him and said, ‘OK, we’d hate to give up a first-round pick, but for two years, he’s gonna be awesome.’ And now, maybe he’s going to be limited for a large portion of Year 1. That, to me, is a major concern.”
Perry then explained that with defenses having a full year of tape on quarterback Drake Maye, they’d devise some better game plans to slow him down. The Patriots’ counter to that expected development seemed to be adding talent across the board.
“And when you take away that talent edge that you thought you had, man, now everybody’s on more of an even playing field,” he said.
Perry also mentioned the domino effect in the receiving room, which by necessity vaults newcomer Romeo Doubs into the No. 1 role for the duration of Brown’s injury absence.
“Now, he might have to be the guy. And I just don’t know if he’s wired that way to be the guy,” Perry said. “He’s a very different personality from [Stefon] Diggs, obviously. He’s a very different personality from A.J. Brown. He is like the anti-receiver in terms of his personality. Usually, you have these guys, crazy bravado, crazy confidence, ‘give me the ball.’ They might not be the biggest guy, but they do have that dog in them oftentimes — the good ones at least. I’m not saying [Doubs is] a bad player or that he’ll be bad moving forward. It’s just, it’s hard for me to envision him now, ‘OK, I need to ratchet things up and I need to take my game to another level and I’m going to show these guys just how freaking competitive I am.’ He’s just, that personality is it’s just a different one.
“And so I’m concerned that he’s not going to be able to fill in and be that guy that it looks like they need him to be.”
