Khyris Tonga got eleven snaps at fullback for the Patriots last season. Eleven. Not a typo. That's the kind of limited usage that typically qualifies as organizational invisibility — the sort of depth chart footnote that disappears into the void. And yet here we are, watching him convert fourth downs on Monday Night Football for Kansas City, and suddenly those eleven snaps feel like a referendum on how the Patriots deploy versatile blockers.
Look, there's context here that matters. Vrabel's offense with the current roster requires specific tools. Tonga clearly has some merit as a run-game contributor and short-yardage specialist — the Chiefs wouldn't be featuring him in prime time otherwise. But the question isn't whether Tonga is useful. It's whether the Patriots left measurable value on the practice field by not finding more ways to activate him when they had the chance.
Eleven snaps suggests either a role mismatch, a depth chart logjam, or both. In the modern NFL, especially in schemes that lean on heavy personnel packages, a fullback with conversion-down capability isn't expendable. The fact that Kansas City identified that value immediately upon acquisition tells us something uncomfortable: the Patriots had the asset but didn't fully weaponize it. That's not a catastrophic miss — it's also not nothing.
This is the kind of small-sample observation that compounds over a season. One Tonga conversion on fourth down is noise. But if Kansas City's scheme creates five or six of these moments while New England's didn't, that's a marginal efficiency loss that shows up in win probability added. It won't make or break anything, but in a competitive division, margins exist for a reason.
The lesson for Vrabel and Wolf moving forward: if you've got a two-way blocker who can help in critical situations, find the snaps. Eleven was apparently eleven too few.