Some Good, Some Not So Good from Drake Maye vs. the Eagles

For some reason, we didn’t see a whole lot of Drake Maye in the Patriots’ first preseason game. For a player who needs experience and isn’t slated to be the starter right away, that didn’t make much sense.

So it was good to see Maye get two quarters against the Eagles on Thursday night.

Despite what we’ve been hearing from the Boston media in recent weeks, the offense looked okay with Maye at the helm. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t terrible. There were some good moments for Maye. There were some not so good moments as well.

Let’s dive in and take a look at both the positives and negatives from his performance. Once again, remember that this was preseason football with vanilla schemes being used on both sides, no player-specific game-planning, and lots of back-ups on the field.

This first play was probably Maye’s best of the night, a 3rd-and-5 on his initial drive. The Patriots had a corner-out combination called to the right and a curl/wrap-in (or spin-dig) to the left:

Maye looked right initially but didn’t like what he saw:

So he came back to his left and drilled the dig for the first down:

That’s an encouraging play because Maye was able to calmly and quickly process a full-field read within the natural timing and rhythm of the play. That’s something he didn’t do consistently in college.

Clearly, doing it once doesn’t mean he can now do it every time, but it’s an encouraging sign.

Many were going nuts about this next throw of Maye’s even though it was an incompletion. The more notable aspect of the play, however, was that Maye did a good job of sliding in the pocket and finding a soft spot from which to throw (something he also struggled to do consistently at UNC):