Why the Patriots should stay the way they went with Drake Maye originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston
What’s wrong with the Patriots drafting Drake Maye “too late”?
He still has a few weeks to learn. His collarbone won’t turn to chalk dust when his linemen collide and a mutant defensive end is unleashed from the sidelines.
He’s watching and improving the offense as it tries to find its footing early in the year.
What if the Patriots start Drake Maye too early?
He could be Darnolded. Or Zach Wilsoned. Or Tua’d. He could be Mac’d because – even though Maye’s predecessor had that admirable rookie year – after 17 NFL games, the Patriots removed all the guardrails and safety nets, put Mac Jones in the league’s most adverse situation and said, “Get ’em.”
The resulting sticky mass is now being used to form a real quarterback in Jacksonville.
I bet you can’t name a single case where a quarterback was hurt by sitting too long. But we can all name ten who started before they were prepared for the chaos and then had to undo the damage.
Now comes the blatant counterargument: “So you want him to sit here all year round?!?!?! UNTIL EVERYTHING IS PERFECT??!!!”
No. And stop screaming.
He has to wait until the team is ready for him. That’s the plan the team has had all season. Just because Jacoby Brissett played worse than expected and Maye was better (a fact Jerod Mayo admitted on Monday morning) is no reason to deviate from that. If you say A, you have to say B.
The Patriots are now in the eye of the storm we all knew was coming. It’s Hurricane Nooline (pronounced “No O-line”).
In February, I wrote on WEEI that the team wasn’t ready for a quarterback. They had too many holes. And if they didn’t want to choose to bench him and watch him get beat up, they should trade him and build him.
I said it again in March, Fast inclinesthat it would have been easy to take the quarterback and that it took courage “to admit that the situation on your roster is so bad that you’re not ready to add a quarterback. To tell everyone there’s no Christmas because you have to pay for the electricity and the groceries.”
They could have made a trade with the Vikings, the 11th and 23rd picks, targeted JJ McCarthy, took an offensive lineman in the first round, still drafted Ja’Lynn Polk, and had two first-round picks for 2025.
That’s the definition of a rebuild. Instead, the Patriots decided to start with the quarterback and build around him.
It’s a very reasonable decision. And certainly not the “wrong” decision considering Maye’s drastic improvement on the field since April and the fact that he appears to have the ideal mental and physical shape one would want in a franchise quarterback.
You can certainly kick aside stones and look back wistfully at the path you did not take and still see the logic and benefits of the path you are on.
What you can’t do is decide to take a detour when the hurricane you KNEW was coming shows up. To satisfy the need for constant outrage, people are now acting like the utter ineptitude of the offensive was a surprise.
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They have no tackles. They had no tackles last year. The last time they spent a first-round pick on a tackle was 2018 (Isaiah Wynn). The first-round guard they took in 2022, Cole Strange, is injured and was average at best when he played. They left out the high-end tackles in free agency (and honestly, they weren’t that high-profile).
Since Dante Scarnecchia retired in 2020, the Patriots have used Cole Popovich, Carmen Bricillo, Matt Patricia, Billy Yates and Adrian Klemm as offensive line coaches (with a fair amount of Bill Belichick added as a fill-in the past two seasons), are building a new offense that’s much different than the one they’ve had before, and have a slew of first- and second-year players on the field.
It definitely shouldn’t be as bad as it was under new offensive line coach Scott Peters, but no one should have expected anything good.
Where do the Patriots stand on August 26, 13 days before their opening game? They have a high-profile rookie who has significantly outperformed the veteran starter on the field over the past two weeks. The veteran starter has a sore shoulder. The head coach acknowledges that Maye has been better than Brissett, but says he is the “second best quarterback.”
So you believe that even though Brissett has played better recently, he’s still the better quarterback because of his eight years of experience. The kid is good. The veteran isn’t. That doesn’t make him better. Or at least not the better option.
That seems to be the logic. And it’s consistent with the plan they’ve put in place.
The team should be thrilled that Maye has gotten so good so quickly. But they don’t want to leave him in the yard when Hurricane Nooline hits and the winds are 110 mph.
We all knew this was coming (except for the part where Maye outscores Brissett). In the short term, it’s less fun to bench the kid, but that’s the path they chose. Now we’ll see if they stick with it.
