FOXBOROUGH - In some ways, Drake Maye is just like you. He has wrestled with what happened in Seattle two Wednesdays ago, knowing full well that he put a blowtorch to a potential win in the season opener.
But unlike you, Maye can do something about it.
“It's a game of decisions in an instant. I think you get to see the consequences when you do not make the right one, and you try to force one or you try to maybe push it down the field,” he said. “I think that's something that, as I say, you learn from, but honestly, at this point, it needs to be a habit.”
Based on his last handful of games, Maye has been resistant, or at least slow to grasp the habits that he admits have been drilled into his brain from the moment Mike Vrabel walked in that door. Considering his youth, that’s not uncommon.
“He always tells me, 'be the conductor' and 'be the guy making the right plays and leading the offense,’” Maye told us of those conversations he’s repeatedly had with his head coach (and offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels as well).
The right plays were staring him in the face in the season opener. But on the first two interceptions, Maye passed up open receivers in the flats to push the ball downfield. The initial pick gave the dormant Seahawks life. The second whipped them into a frenzy. But we shouldn’t be surprised this is how it's playing for the third-year pro.
This is an incredibly difficult line to walk, and it is the same conversation we were having about Maye during September of last year. It’s also what they said in Buffalo about Josh Allen (and occasionally still do), who said this back in 2020:
"I'm not going to be Captain Checkdown. I'm going to continue to play the game the way I love it."
To his credit, Allen did adapt to the times. His aDot (average depth of target) was an outlandish 11.5 as a rookie but has decreased nearly every year of his career (save for a spike in 2022). Allen has learned to take the profit at a much higher clip than he did as a younger player, and that’s what Vrabel and this coaching staff have tried to impress upon Maye.
“That’s what playing quarterback or playing in this league is all about,” Vrabel said. “It is about our players having the knowledge, the skill and the repetitions to make great split-second decisions. I think that there is a difference between – we have said this – being reckless and being aggressive. We want to be aggressive. That’s how we want to play. But we also have to make great decisions when there is a look or something that maybe would take a certain play away.”
“Sometimes checking it down over and over may feel monotonous, but at the same time it's the right thing to do and it keeps the chains moving,” Maye added, though that word - ‘monotonous ’- seemed to be met with some resistance from the quarterback. Why? Because it flies in the face of who he’s always been, or what he’s always had in his bag.
In high school, Maye was the best player on the field, a Superman amongst boys. In college, it was more of the same, only at North Carolina, the same level of talent didn’t surround him as at many of the schools he was playing. So that put Maye in create mode, knowing that to win, he might have to do something outside the structure. Ditto in year one of his pro career. That team stunk.
Then, last year, it all came together after the first three weeks of the regular season. Maye matured at a rapid clip, and when he did stray from the plan, he rarely got burned - that is, until the postseason, when the stakes were raised, the quality of opponents elevated, and his mistakes were magnified and more frequent. That puts us right back where we were a year ago, wondering whether this impatience, as he termed it, will always be part of Maye’s game.
“I think what we're going to find out as we go through this season is - people will do different things," McDaniels observed. “We will see different things, and it will require us to be, I would say, in my words, discipline, because patience sounds like a passive word to me. I agree with some of those things, but I think discipline is