Everybody Calm the Hell Down About Drake Maye

I didn't expect the Drake Maye panic to get here this quickly. I don't thikn anybody did. 

We're three games into the season and apparently we've already decided we need to reevaluate everything we thought we knew about him, start planning to draft his replacement, and if you've been listening to WEEI at all today- explore the option of trading for Case Keenum. (I wish I was joking)

I'm not going to sit here and tell you Drake Maye has been good. He hasn't, he's been pretty fucking bad.

The interceptions are bad. Some of the decisions he's making are REALLY bad. As Bruce Arians told Kay Adams in the interview above, he's trying to force things that aren't there, he's holding onto the ball too long, and it looks like he's trying to make every play himself. So if you're watching these games and thinking, “What the hell is Drake doing?”- I'm with you.

But I also think everybody needs to take about 14 steps back before we start rewriting the last two years of evidence on the guy.

Because there are a few things that seem to be getting conveniently forgotten. For starters, the guy was hurt, really fucking badly at the end of last season and post season. 

He was hurt badly enough during the playoffs last year that he needed his shoulder basically deadened with a shot before the Super Bowl just so he could play. 

The Pats had an unbelievable season and probably overachieved relative to where most people thought they would be. Eventually you're going to run into a team that's better than you, it sucks that that was the Seattle Seahawks and that it happened in the Super Bowl.

Ane the Seahawks, a well coached team, had the scouting report on him. 

That doesn't suddenly mean Drake Maye was a fraud. And I think people are also completely overlooking what happened to the offense this offseason.

They got rid of Kayshon Boutte and Stefon Diggs. Those were two of the guys Maye had developed the best chemistry with.

Boutte especially became one of his favorite deep-ball guys. And if you actually watched the Patriots last year, you saw it. Maye trusted him and he knew where Boutte was going to be, and Boutte knew where the ball was going to be. They clicked like all good receivers and their QBs do.

And then you have Diggs, who obviously became a huge part of the passing game. He's gone too. So the Patriots go out and replace one of those guys with A.J. Brown, who, yes, is fucking awesome, but just one big problem-  Maye and A.J. Brown didn't play one single preseason game together.

And I know preseason is boring and everybody hates watching it and we all pretend it doesn't matter. But this is exactly what preseason is for. (And this ties into Arians' point.) It's for the quarterback and his receivers to actually play football together. Not practice, or walkthroughs. And not seven-on-seven shit where the players all tell the reporters “we're going 100 percent” when actuality everybody knows nobody is actually going 100 percent because nobody wants to get hurt before the season starts. But real, actual football. Where defenders are disguising coverage and guys are getting hit for real. The quarterback is having to make a decisions in two seconds and receivers are having to adjust their routes on the fly. That's how you build chemistry. Maye and Brown never got that, and then Brown gets hurt right off the bat.

So now you've taken away the two guys Maye had the most established chemistry with from last season, replaced one of them with a guy who was supposed to be his security blanket that he barely got to play with, and then that guy gets hurt.

But now  everybody is looking at Maye wondering why the offense doesn't look exactly like it did last year, and gee, I don't know, maybe that's part of it?

And I'm not even saying this as an apologist trying to excuse some of the shit Maye has done. Because there are no excuses for throwing a ball into triple coverage. Just as there is no excuse for some of these mindless interceptions we've seen him throw.

But there's a massive difference between “Drake Maye is playing badly right now” and “Drake Maye isn't actually very good.”

Those are two completely different arguments. One that I would happily stand on the same side of as John Gruden and laugh at you for telling us differently-

Because we have a pretty enormous sample size of him being good. Last year he completed 72 percent of his passes for 4,394 yards, 31 touchdowns and just eight interceptions. His passer rating was 113.5. He finished second in MVP voting. And, perhaps most importantly, he wasn't just putting up those numbers by throwing five-yard checkdowns all afternoon. The guy was fucking nailing deep ball throws. Next Gen Stats had him completing 25 of 48 passes of 20-plus air yards last season. That's 52.1% and the EPA on those throws was ridiculous.

Those aren't “his receiver made him look good” throws, they are "that is a legit quarterback throws." The ball is coming out on time, it's placed where the receiver can actually get it, and he's making throws down the field that most quarterbacks simply aren't capable of making consistently. That guy didn't just poof and disappear, he's still in there somewhere.

And as mentioned above, Bruce Arians was on Kay Adams' show this week talking about basically the same thing- and he pushed back on the idea that Maye's success last year can just be explained away because the Patriots supposedly had an easy schedule. He called that kind of thinking lazy and said Maye is clearly talented. But he also made what I think is the more important point-  Maye is trying to do too much, and watching him right now, I think that's exactly what we're seeing. Because he looks like a guy who feels like he has to make something happen on every fucking play. And instead of taking what the defense gives him, he's trying to turn every play into a highlight. 

Sometimes you just have to take the six-yard completion, or throw the ball away. Sometimes the defense wins and you're forced to punt. That's just football. And Mike Vrabel seems to understand that, as he's talked publicly about getting Maye to relax and stop gripping everything so tightly. Which makes sense, because you can see it just from watching on tv. He's pressing like a mother fucker and honestly, I think that's a much more reasonable explanation for what we're seeing than “Oh shit, Drake Maye actually sucks.” Because if Drake Maye actually sucks, then I have absolutely no fucking explanation for what we watched him do for 17 games last year.

And here's another thing Arians said that I think people need to remember, because he's dead on- there is no such thing as an "easy" NFL schedule. No matter what you tell yourself.  This idea that the Patriots just beat a bunch of shitty teams last year, and just coasted to a fucking Super Bowl appearance, where they lost, and therefore none of it counts is ridiculous. Go look at the NFL every single Sunday, and you'll see that teams lose games they're not supposed to lose constantly. Favorites get their asses kicked outright, teams everybody thought were terrible suddenly look great just as teams everybody thought were great suddenly look like they don't belong on the same field. That's the NFL and that's where the term "any given Sunday" comes from.

You don't get bonus points for playing a “hard” schedule and you don't get to erase wins because somebody decided afterward that your opponent wasn't very good. You play who's on the schedule, and you win or you lose, and last year, the Patriots won 14 fucking games, and Drake Maye was a huge reason why. Now he's played three bad games and suddenly we're supposed to pretend none of that happened?

Maybe the Patriots have legitimate problems on offense that aren't going to magically disappear. Maybe it's a coaching thing? 

(Sidebar- Felger of course has it on good authority that Maye's team has been leaking this theory to the media, that the issue is the play calling and coaching, not just Maye's poor decision making, that's hurting the team. Take that as you may.)

Update- Jerry blogged about this earlier- 

And now the rest of the vultures are circling the wounded animal salivating 

I'm not going to watch three games and suddenly decide the guy who threw for 4,394 yards, 31 touchdowns, eight interceptions, finished second in MVP voting and was one of the best deep-ball quarterbacks in football last year somehow forgot how to play quarterback. And if you are doing that, just know that you're a flat out hater, and you need to change your diaper. 

Yes, I think he's pressing and he's clearly trying to do too much. Yes I think he's putting way too much pressure on himself, and I think the best thing the Patriots can do right now is get him to calm the fuck down. Those of us with a brain knew coming into this season that it wasn't going to be a fun one. Anytime you come off a Super Bowl loss, it sucks. There's this half excited, half dread cloud that looms around that you just can't describe to a Jets fan or a Cowboys fan because just getting to a Super Bowl would be the happiest moment of their lives. But Pats fans know all too well the feeling of climbing the mountain all the way to the top, coming away empty handed, and having to start all the way back down again at the base of the mountain again next summer. Plus Coach Vrabel and his extracurrical activities set the tone during the offseason and put a giant media target on the teams backs. Couple all of that with the fact that New England came into this season playing against two of the tougher divisions in the league, many on the road, and it was not going to be a cake walk. So yes, some setbacks should have been expected. But already wanting to throw Drake Maye out with the bathwater is extreme as fuck, even by Mass sports fan standards. So smarten the fuck up. And lighten the fuck up. Because we've already seen what Drake Maye looks like when he isn't trying to save the entire franchise on every possession and that guy is pretty fucking good. Maybe we give the guy a chance to be that guy again before we start the funeral.