Why Patriots should stay on the path they chose with Drake Maye

If the Patriots start Drake Maye “too late,” what’s the harm?

He gets a few more weeks of learning. His clavicle doesn’t get turned to chalk dust after his linemen collide and set some mutant defensive end loose off the edge.

He watches and improves while the offense finds whatever footing it can in the early part of the year.

If the Patriots start Drake Maye too early?

He could get Darnolded. Or Zach Wilsoned. Or Tua’d. He could get Mac’d, because -- even though Maye’s predecessor had that admirable rookie year -- the Patriots took away all guardrails and safety nets after 17 NFL games, put Mac Jones in the most adverse situation in the league and said, "Go get ‘em."

The resulting puddle of goo is now being reconstituted into an actual quarterback in Jacksonville.

I bet you can’t provide me one instance of a quarterback damaged by sitting too long. But we can all come up with 10 who started before they were ready for the chaos and then had to have the damage undone.  

Cue the smooth-brained counter-argument: “SO YOU WANT HIM TO SIT ALL YEAR?!?!?! UNTIL EVERYTHING’S PERFECT??!!!”

No. And stop yelling.

He needs to sit until the team is ready for him. Which is the plan the team had all offseason. Just because Jacoby Brissett’s played worse than imagined and Maye’s been better (a fact Jerod Mayo acknowledged Monday morning), there’s no cause to deviate. In for a dime, in for a dollar.

The Patriots are now in the eye of the storm we all knew would hit. It’s Hurricane Nooline (pronounced “No O-line").

In February, I went on WEEI to say the team wasn’t ready for a quarterback. It had too many holes. And unless they wanted to choose between sitting him and watching him get battered, they should trade down and build.

I said it again in March on Quick Slants, that the easy thing to do was to take the quarterback and the thing that took guts was, “Admitting your roster situation is so bad you’re not ready to add a quarterback. Telling everybody there’s no Christmas because you have to pay for the electricity and you have to pay for the groceries."

They could have traded down with the Vikings, gotten the 11^th and 23^rd picks, angled for J.J. McCarthy, taken a first-round offensive lineman, still drafted Ja’Lynn Polk and had two first-round picks for 2025.

That’s the very definition of rebuilding. Instead, the Patriots chose to start with the quarterback and then build out around him.

It’s a very defensible decision. And certainly not the "wrong" decision given Maye’s drastic on-field improvement since April and the fact he seems to have the ideal mental and physical makeup you want for a franchise quarterback.   

You can certainly kick rocks and look back wistfully at the road not taken while still seeing the logic and upside of the road you’re on.

What you can’t do is decide to detour when the hurricane you KNEW was going to hit shows up. To satisfy the need for perpetual outrage, people are now acting like the total ineptitude of the offensive line is a surprise.

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They don’t have tackles. They didn’t have tackles last year. The last time they spent a first-round pick on a tackle was in 2018 (Isaiah Wynn). The first-round guard they took in 2022, Cole Strange, is injured and has been average at best when he’s played. They passed on the high-end tackles in free agency (and truth be told, they weren’t that high-end).

Since Dante Scarnecchia retired in 2020, the Patriots have cycled through Cole Popovich, Carmen Bricillo, Matt Patricia, Billy Yates and Adrian Klemm as offensive line coaches (with a heavy dose of Bill Belichick helping out the past two seasons). They are installing a new offense that’s vastly different that the one they’ve run and have a fleet of first- and second-year players on the field.

It definitely shouldn’t be as bad as it is under first-year offensive line coach Scott Peters, but nobody should have anticipated good.

Where do the Patriots sit on August 26 with the opener 13 days away? They have a high-end rookie who’s significantly outperformed the veteran starter on the field for the last two weeks at least. The veteran starter has a sore-ass shoulder. The head coach is acknowledging Maye outperformed Brissett but is saying he’s the “second-best quarterback.”

So that leaves them believing that, even though Brissett’s been outperformed recently, he’s still the better quarterback right now based on eight years of experience. The kid’s hot. The veteran’s not. That doesn’t make him better. Or at least the better option.

That seems to be the logic. And it tracks with the plan they installed.

The team should be giddy that Maye is this good this quickly. But they don’t want to leave him in the yard when Hurricane Nooline hits and the winds are at 110 miles an hour.

We all knew this was coming (except for the Maye outplaying Brissett part). It’s less fun in the short run to sit the kid, but it’s the path they chose. Now we’ll see if they stay on it.