FOXBOROUGH - How does Reggie Gilliam know when the running game is going well?
“I know when I feel the back cut off my hip,” he laughed. “Usually, that's a good indicator that we’ve blocked it up a hat for a hat.”
After trying to get by with Jack Westover at fullback a year ago, the Patriots added Gilliam this offseason in what should be an instant upgrade. Westover did what he could, but Gilliam brings experience and real credentials to the spot.
He helped pave the way for one of the best ground games in all of football in 2024 and 2025 with the Bills, and there was some real internal consternation in Buffalo over his departure. That said, they were in no real position to extend themselves the way the Pats did, and yes, New England made sure Gilliam couldn’t say no. It may have been a bit of an overpay - including the signing bonus, he’s getting $6 million in 2026. - but if he can impact Josh McDaniels’ offense like he did Joe Brady’s, well, it will have been money well spent.
“Coming here, talking to Josh and him telling me about all the plans he has for me, (I’m) super excited for it,” Gilliam said after Tuesday’s walkthrough.
Earlier this summer, Mike Vrabel talked about the number of things that make for a good running football team, but one of them stuck out to me like a sore thumb: “You have to have a mentality and a mindset to want to run the football.”
Enter Gilliam. He’s not a Patrick Ricard-like monster, a near 300-pound bowling ball as compared to Gilliam’s 255. But he is more malleable within an offense - we’ve seen him line up in numerous spots - and when he does get downhill, he should give the Pats far more movement than Westover did (and if he doesn’t, it would mean that signing didn’t go to plan).
I want to be able to tell you more about the difference Gilliam has made thus far. Still, between managing his reps - he admitted to being pretty beat up after last season - and the lack of run-game physicality in training camp, it’s more of a projection than hard evidence.
“It's all about the fit,” Gilliam said of his process at this time of year. “We're not finishing all the way through the whistle, but getting fit up and having square feet and making sure my base is right, just so when it is time to put somebody down, that you're in the right spot for it.
“So it's not like walk up and touch the guy. You still got to get a fit because come tomorrow, come Thursday (the joint practices with the Eagles), and for the rest of the season, like those guys are coming downhill and you got to meet them.”
Gilliam only played about 20% of the snaps last season, but James Cook led the league in yards before contact, with 645 of his 1,621 yards before a defender could get a hand on him. Again, that’s not all because of the fullback, but an indicator of his overall value. That was something Brady and a fella by the name of Josh Allen highlighted after Cook went for 200+ yards in a game against Carolina last fall.
"We were able to get in a lot of big people runs," the then-offensive coordinator said. "The guys were just all connected with it, and Reggie did an incredible job of, boom, hopping inside and cleaning it up for us and making a big play. And he's a huge part of who we are and what we do. And a guy that never gets any credit or doesn't get the production, but he just does his 1/11th at the highest standard. And good things happen when he's on the field."
"He's the ultimate Swiss Army knife for us, playing tight end, playing fullback, and obviously he plays a lot of special teams for us,” Allen said. "A guy that plays football the right way, doesn't care about the stats, doesn't care about his name being in the paper. But if you go back and watch some of the runs that Jimbo's (Cook) had over the last few weeks, he's been involved in quite a few of them, going in there and doing some of their dirty work. So kind of an unsung hero of our offense right now."
If McDaniels and Maye are saying something similar about their new fullback/Swiss Army knife, especially after a week-four trip to Buffalo, then all will be going according to the Pats’ offseason plans. But in the meantime, Gilliam is still studying, still learning and getting closer to where he wants to be.
“I'm getting to the point where it's not so much thinking anymore, and you know football's football at the end of the day,” he said. “So the same schemes that I ran in Buffalo are really similar to the schemes here. Just different verbs, different names for everything. So just like, okay, I got to relate this play to this is what it was called in Buffalo. Okay, now I don't have to think about this new word anymore. I'm just like, okay, I remember what it was. Let's run it.”
Let’s run it, indeed — music to Vrabel’s ears.