Pats Pulpit
New England Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels has now called two games for quarterback Drake Maye. So far, the longtime play caller has enjoyed the experience.
“He’s as easy to talk to as anybody we have. He sees the game very well. The conversations you have are accurate,” McDaniels said Thursday. “If you ask him a question, you’re going to get the right answer. It’s not maybe the best answer that we could have done, but he knows exactly what took place on the field, and he’s always honest. Very informative, wants to do it the right way, takes coaching extremely well. I don’t know what else I could — fantastic.”
After a rocky opener, New England’s offense bounced back in Week 2 with a win over the Miami Dolphins. Maye delivered perhaps the best game of his young career, completing 19 of 23 passes for 230 yards and contributing three total touchdowns.
McDaniels now hopes that progression continues for the signal caller.
“Love his approach from day to day. Like I said, his process is never ending and always evolving in terms of his improvement,” said McDaniels. “He got better from Week 1 to Week 2. I hope he gets better from Week 2 to Week 3 and continues to do that every single day. With the way he goes about it, I think we have a realistic shot at doing that. The list is long. He knows that and he loves that.
“Really enjoy working with him. The couple games that I’ve had a chance to call with him, hopefully we just continue to get better and better.”
New England’s play caller helped his quarterback find a nice rhythm against Miami calling more motion and moving pockets. Whether those concepts become a staple for the offense moving forward remains to be seen.
“I don’t know if we got closer. We probably played cleaner. I don’t think we’re going to be able to do the same thing every week. That’s hard to do. The players on the other team and the scheme sometimes dictate what you can and can’t do, but I thought they executed what we thought was best to execute against Miami last week at a better rate than what we did the first week. I thought those things, like you said, helped us.
“There’s a shelf life for everything. As long as you stay in the positive down and distance situations, then you can do that… They helped us last week. Whether we can do them again this week or next week or whatever, that’ll probably be a week-to-week conversation. I’m not worried about that. I think we have plenty of things that hopefully we’ll be able to do well when the time is right to do them.”
While McDaniels has long been a game plan coach, he has enjoyed leaning on the wisdom and experience of his new staff this year. That group’s West Coast background has led to the installation of more wide zone...
