FOXBORO — The Patriots must be willing to make adjustments after Sunday’s 20-13 loss to the Raiders, and one of those might be lessening Drake Maye’s workload.
Head coach Mike Vrabel was asked Monday about his quarterback and if there’s too much on Maye’s plate.
“I think we have to evaluate that,” Vrabel said. “We have to find out, is there something there or we’ve just got to figure out what our guys do best and do that. Because if you do that, then you have to be really good, as opposed to trying to scheme or get into the right situation. Again, we just make sure that we’re giving him answers by trying not to give him too much. I think that’s always the balance and the fine line.”
Maye was 30-of-46 for 287 yards with one touchdown and one interception in the Week 1 loss to the Raiders. Maye struggled in the second half and when the Raiders were bringing pressure.
Vrabel said Monday morning on WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show” that Maye needs to be “precise, not perfect.”
“I think that he wants to be, at times, perfect, and [we] need to get past that,” Vrabel said. “We all have to get past that. … If you make a mistake, it’s the reaction that you have to the mistake that everybody sees. And then they’re like, ‘Oh wow, that was a mistake.’ We have to clean our reactions up. Our responses have to be much better. And then getting into the flow, because you see really good timing and precision and accuracy, and then we see some other misses.”
Vrabel expounded on that Monday afternoon in a press conference.
“I think in everything that we do, we always want to be competitive and do it the right way. But then, there just can’t be any sort of block that keeps us from just going and playing the game and knowing that it’s not going to look great at times, but it’s going to be making a play. … I don’t say that by going rogue. There’s a scheme to it, but then throughout the course of the game, somebody makes a play.”
Vrabel also complimented Maye’s decision-making and accuracy but acknowledged there were some “misses.”
As the third overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft, Maye was expected to take a significant second-year leap in 2025. There’s still time for that to happen, but he didn’t show significant progress in Week 1 of his second season.
