New England Patriots
“It’s one of those things where I feel like he probably thought it sounded good in his head when he said it.”
Kevin Byard was not surprised with C.J. Gardner-Johnson’s comments on Sunday. AP Photo/Gary McCullough
There’s still plenty of football left in the 2026 NFL season.
But it’s not a stretch to say that Patriots wideout Efton Chism III will land on the league’s season-ending highlight reel for his absurd, one-handed catch that secured New England’s comeback win over the Bills on Sunday.
“Snag of the year, man,” wide receiver Romeo Doubs said postgame after Chism’s touchdown catch gave New England the lead with just 1:50 left on the clock.
Bills safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson was also impressed with Chism’s one-handed snag.
But the veteran defensive back also made some digs against the second-year wideout after New England landed Buffalo a 29-26 loss.
“We’re not going to get into no bulletin-board material,” Gardner-Johnson said after the loss. “A [practice squad] guy made a helluva catch. Probably won’t hear from him again, respectfully. …Everybody knows who’s the better team. Everybody says, ‘Oh, you see the score.’ But the better team lost today. But we’ll come back. We’ll be back.”
Gardner-Johnson’s comments quickly made the rounds, with Mike Vrabel responding to his harsh words against Chism on Monday morning while on WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show.”
“For a guy that’s been on eight teams in four years, I mean I guess he knows the drill,” Vrabel said of Gardner-Johnson.
Appearing on WEEI’s “Rich and Ken with Ted Johnson” on Monday evening, Drake Maye didn’t take the bait when asked about his own reaction to Gardner-Johnson’s trash talk.
No, I don’t have to say too much about that,” Maye said. “I think obviously we got the last laugh [Sunday], and we’ll see them again down the road. So, we’ll see where it goes then.”
Patriots safety Kevin Byard elaborated more on Gardner-Johnson’s comments during his own WEEI spot with “Rich and Ken,” saying he wasn’t surprised that it was Gardner-Johnson who offered up some bulletin-board material with his postgame musings.
“I played with C.J. Gardner-Johnson in Chicago last year, so his comments at the end of the game are very on brand for who he is and what he’s all about,” Byard noted. “I think they kind of brought C.J. to Buffalo to kind of be, I would say, like the bad guy in a way. That’s kind of who he’s been in his entire career. … Now, I don’t agree with what he said. Obviously, Chis is a big part of what we do.
“He may not have been projected to be this starter. … But Chis was making plays all through training camp. He’s never been a practice-squad guy. I think he made the roster last year. He made the roster this year, and so when guys went down, he’s always able to come in and make plays for the team, and it kind of just showed yesterday.”
As Byard noted, Chism has never been on an NFL practice squad since initially joining the Patriots as an undrafted free agent last year. The 24-year-old wideout made the Patriots’ 53-man roster out of training camp in both 2025 and 2026.
Ironically, Gardner-Johnson found himself on the Ravens’ practice squad during the 2025 season — only to get cut after just a week in Baltimore.
”It’s one of those things where I feel like he probably thought it sounded good in his head when he said it,” Byard said of Gardner-Johnson. “But it’s like when you really break it down, it’s like, ‘Well, if that’s the case, if everything you said is true, then what happened?’ You know what I mean?”
Byard — now in his 11th season in the NFL — was then asked what he would say to a player like Gardner-Johnson if he was still in the same locker room as him.
“I would just honestly tell him, like, ‘Bro, don’t put no more fuel to the fire — because at the end of the day, we lost.’ When I think about past games, for example, the Seattle Seahawks game — we didn’t finish. You know what I mean? Like, we were up in that game and we ended up losing. Regardless of how we lost? We lost. So [there’s] no point in saying like, ‘Oh, the better team didn’t win or this and that.’”
“No, you give them credit. We didn’t do good enough, and we gotta get back to work. Because at the end of the day, now you’re putting a bigger target on yourself, you put a bigger target on your teammates, and now some other people in the locker room are answering questions based on comments that you made. … You don’t want to be that guy [who’s] gonna do that.
The 3-1 Bills hold a slight edge over the 2-2 Patriots atop the AFC East.
But Byard believes that it’s a dangerous game to play when it comes to harping on “better teams” not getting the expected results out on the gridiron.
“When you talk about the better team, like records, whatever may be, it doesn’t mean anything. Any given Sunday,” Byard said.
Conor Ryan is a staff writer covering the Bruins, Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox for Boston.com, a role he has held since 2023.
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