Drake Maye struggles: one touchdown, six interceptions and where the drives are dying
Every rate that improved between his first and second seasons has gone backwards. But New England is 12th in the league in yards per drive and last in points per drive, which locates the problem.
The size of the drop
The bottom line: Every rate statistic that improved between Maye’s first and second seasons has gone backwards this year.
- His completion rate has fallen from 72.0% to 63.8%, his yards per attempt from 8.9 to 7.3 and his passer rating from 113.5 to 58.6, CBS Sports reported.
- CBS also laid out the year-one to year-two jump that made this season’s expectations: completion rate 66.6% to 72.0%, yards per attempt 6.7 to 8.9, touchdowns to interceptions 15-10 to 31-8, passer rating 88.1 to 113.5, EPA per dropback minus-0.03 to plus-0.28, and turnover-worthy play rate 3.5% to 2.7%.
- Six interceptions through three games is the most by a Patriots quarterback over that stretch of a season since Drew Bledsoe threw eight through three games in 1994, his second year in the league, the Associated Press reported.
- He has committed seven turnovers in three games, per Boston.com.
- Against Jacksonville he completed a season-low 56%, going 14 of 25 with two interceptions and a lost fumble.
The offense moves the ball and then stops
The bottom line: New England is 12th in the league in yards per drive and last in points per drive, which locates the problem at the end of drives rather than the start of them.
Patriots.com’s Evan Lazar put the split plainly in his film review: the Patriots are tied for last in points scored at 12.0 a game, last in points per drive at 1.0 and last in touchdown percentage at 6.7%, and 29th in the share of drives reaching the red zone at 20%. They are 12th in yards per drive at 32.6. “Drives are stalling or the Patriots are turning the ball over after crossing the opponent’s 50-yard line,” he wrote.
Sunday was that in miniature. New England drove inside the Jacksonville 35-yard line six times and came away with two field goals. Lazar cited Next Gen Stats putting the seven drives into Jacksonville territory as New England’s most without a touchdown since Week 8 of 2003, a 23-year gap.
Lazar counted five turnover-worthy plays from Maye against the Jaguars, including an interception thrown from the opponent’s 2-yard line.
What is around him is genuinely bad
The bottom line: The supporting case is real and quantified, which is what makes the rest of it hard to dismiss.
- The Patriots are last in the NFL in rushing success rate at 28.4%. Buffalo, their next opponent, leads at 52.5%.
- A.J. Brown has been on injured reserve since Week 1.
- New England started a third-string right guard against Jacksonville. The right side allowed nine pressures and Maye was pressured on 41.4% of his dropbacks.
- Coming into that game he had faced a 43.5% pressure rate on the season, fourth-highest among starting quarterbacks, CBS reported, citing Pro Football Focus.
- CBS made the counter-argument in the same piece: pressure can cause bad plays and a missing No. 1 receiver can shrink the margin for error, but neither explains a quarterback turning the ball over at this rate.
What the quarterback and the coach are saying
The bottom line: Maye has been harder on himself than Vrabel has, and Vrabel has still called one of the decisions terrible.
- “I’ve got to look myself in the mirror and take this as a turning point,” Maye said. “It’s Week 3, and at the same time we’ve got to get some fuel and realize that what we’re doing out there offensively is unacceptable. It’s been unacceptable for three weeks.”
- Asked on WEEI for his assessment of the interception Travis Hunter caught in the end zone, Vrabel said: “That it’s a terrible decision. We want to throw touchdown passes. We want to sack the quarterback. We want to intercept the ball. But if those opportunities aren’t there, we always talk about those split-second decisions.”
- Vrabel on a quarterback pressing: “Sometimes when Greg and I go golfing and we really want to make a good score, sometimes we’re so focused on it that we try choke the life out of the golf club, and we’re squeezing it so damn tight that the ball has no choice but to go sideways.”
- In the third quarter at Jacksonville, Vrabel stood in front of Maye on the sideline with both hands on his shoulders, talking to him for an extended period, AP reported.
- Maye, on moving past mistakes: “There’s times last year where you gotta flip to the next play and realize that this league will humble you quick.”
The one game that complicates the story
The bottom line: Maye was excellent for three quarters of the season opener before the collapse that started all of this.
Through three quarters at Seattle he was 17 of 22 with a touchdown, no interceptions and a 105.7 passer rating, CBS reported. He threw three interceptions in the fourth quarter. He later said he had been “impatient” in the second half, SB Nation noted.
Lazar declined to settle on a single cause, writing that mental miscues, the personnel without Brown, lingering questions about Maye’s throwing shoulder from last season’s playoff run and the scheme are all on the table.
Our take
He looks broken. He isn’t, and the proof is a pair of numbers nobody has bothered to put next to each other.
The Patriots are 12th in the league in yards per drive. They are dead last in points per drive. An offense that can’t play doesn’t move the ball at a league-average clip. This one moves it fine, right up until the field gets short, and then it hands the ball back. Six trips inside the Jacksonville 35 on Sunday. Two field goals.
Maye hasn’t forgotten how to throw. He’s making the wrong call in the two seconds when the field shrinks and the window slams shut. He was 17 of 22 through three quarters in Seattle before the same thing happened to him in the fourth. Vrabel got there first with the golf club bit, and he’s right: this is a guy squeezing, not a guy swinging badly.
Now the good news and the bad news, which are the same news. Bad decisions under pressure are coachable. Arm strength and accuracy are not, and he doesn’t need either of them fixed. The stuff generating the pressure is fixable too. Brown comes off injured reserve at some point. The interior line settles. A run game sitting last in the league at 28.4% success finds some kind of floor.
The problem is the calendar. Buffalo is next, the Bills run it better than anybody, and every week this looks the same is a week it stops looking like a slump.