In Drake Maye, Patriots chose the right guy for a nasty job

Tough day for the “Ohhhhh, but what if he gets hurt?!?!?!?” crowd.

Drake Maye got folded in half like a chaise lounge on one throw, landed on like a sectional sofa at the end of a strip sack and took a pretty good pounding in general in his first NFL start against the Texans on Sunday.

This was a Houston defense that a week earlier harassed Josh Allen into a 9-for-30, 131-yard day and had -- in Week 2 -- sacked No. 1 overall pick Caleb Williams seven times and picked him off twice.

Maye was more than fine. He was actually pretty good. Grading on a curve, he was excellent, throwing for 243 yards and three touchdowns on 20-for-33 passing. He threw two picks, took four sacks and lost a fumble.

When you consider it was his first NFL start and he was sent into battle with a butter knife and a squirt gun, there should be more than a little pep in the step of Patriots fans.

He showed the live arm. He showed the downfield accuracy. He showed the footspeed to escape and the decisiveness to know when he should. It didn’t look like “recess” -- a term legendary coach Dante Scarnecchia used when he envisioned a worst-case scenario for Maye's first start.

Most importantly, he showed terrific mental and physical toughness.

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That was the thing I liked about Maye above all the other prospects during the run-up to the draft. He’d dealt with a fair amount of adversity at North Carolina. Offensive coordinator switch before last season. High-level wideout talent graduating or dealing with injury. A FBS-high 409 pressures faced between 2022 and 2023. And yet he ran for 953 yards and 23 touchdowns. He took a thrashing, which I detailed in this story back in early April.

He never whined, pointed fingers or rolled around like a salmon on the deck of a boat after taking a thunderous hit. For a bad team with a shoddy offensive line and a lean wide receiver room, Maye -- like Drew Bledsoe in 1993 -- was a perfect fit. And the Patriots knew it.

“(One) of the things that often gets lost is just competitiveness and toughness,” Jerod Mayo said in March. “You see some of the top quarterbacks in the league, like those guys get smacked and get right back up. ... I think that is very important when you're kind of scouting this position.

"The competitor, like Tom [Brady], the toughness, like, you see guys like Joe Burrow, he gets smacked and gets right back up. It's pretty impressive. But it also sends that subliminal message to the rest of the team, like, 'I'm here with you. I'm gonna get hit, and I'm gonna get back up, and we just gotta continue to go as we go forward.'"

Personnel man Eliot Wolf added, "Body language on the field is very important at that position. You don’t want a guy that’s throwing his hands up after a bad play, or you can you can see him physically pointing at somebody. Body language is important, everybody’s looking to the quarterback."

On Monday, this is what Mayo said impressed him most about Maye in his first start:

“I would say the thing that was a pleasant surprise, he did take some shots yesterday. I think there were one or two where he got up a little bit slow, but just his overall toughness, I think, was on display yesterday.”

The simple fact is, the Patriots cannot duck the suck. They didn’t do enough in the offseason to bolster a bad offensive line. An avalanche of injuries left them scouring LinkedIn for starters. It was an unserious effort to put Maye in a good spot. Lucky for them, he -- like Jacoby Brissett -- can take a thrashing. Unlike Brissett, Maye is adept at scooting around and making plays on the move.

Putting the Patriots' 243 passing yards on Sunday into perspective, there were three games last season when they had more than that (256 vs. Broncos; 272 vs. Bills; 306 vs. Eagles). They were over 243 five times in 2022 and nine times in 2021. Since 2020, they’ve been over 300 passing yards just nine times.

Nine times in four seasons. Tom Brady topped 300 yards 108 times in the preceding 19 years.

I don’t need to tell you this, but the Patriots’ passing offense has been truly unwatchable for much of the past five years. In the old days, 243 with three TDs was an OK day. Now? It’s a bonanza. (Here’s a song that fits the mood.)

For the first five games, the Patriots' approach was to not lose. Keep it close. Maybe get some breaks and run into some wins. That happened once, the opener against the Bengals. Brissett was the embodiment of that mindset. And that was fine. Until it wasn’t.

At 1-5, the Patriots are permitted to give up the ghost. They aren’t talented, they make too many unforced errors, they have too many injuries and the coaching staff is inexperienced. Mayo actually articulated what the next 11 games are about on Monday.

“This isn’t a one-year thing in my mind. It’s going to take time to continue to build out the roster, and that’s how it is,” Mayo said. “From a roster standpoint, just in general, especially with our younger players, we had to see what we have this year, no matter what the record is. When we get out of this season, we need to know exactly what we have from a talent standpoint and then fill the holes that we need to fill.”

Through all those holes will come adversity. Maye -- more than any other player -- will shoulder it. There’s really no telling how he’ll ultimately come through it.

There are more headstones in First-Round Quarterback Cemetery than there are first-rounders who flourished in their first job out of college. Maye is, as my mother used to say, “In for it.”

Every player has a breaking point. The Patriots are fortunate that the guy they got appears to have a a very, very high one. And a high threshold for pain.