Pats Pulpit
A short memory will be crucial for the New England Patriots this week.
Having lost its season opener 20-13 to the visiting Las Vegas Raiders in rather uninspiring fashion, the team of head coach Mike Vrabel will travel to Miami to take on a Dolphins squad that also started the season with an L. With both teams under some pressure already at this early stage in the season, any lingering issues from Week 1 could become a problem; as Vrabel himself said, this is a true test for the culture he is trying to build.
Naturally, our focus this week was on both of those games. For anything else not covered previously, let’s clean out the notebook. Welcome to this week’s edition of our Sunday Patriots Notes.
Last week’s game against the Raiders was not Drake Maye’s finest hour as a quarterback. He did pass for a career-high 287 yards and a touchdown, but he also tossed an interception, had a fumble, and struggled with ball placement and poise in the pocket.
In short, he was far from perfect. In the NFL, however, perfection can be a fluid concept; you can play what effectively amounts to a perfect game as a quarterback but still miss throws or make bad reads. Being spot-on on every play is a noble goal, but as Mike Vrabel pointed out, it is nothing that is realistic.
For Maye, that is something he needs to realize as well.
“I think that he wants to be, at times, perfect, and I need to get past that. We all have to get past that,” said Vrabel. “You need to be precise and not perfect. 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. Then getting into the flow because you see really good timing and precision and accuracy. Then we see some other misses. But I don’t ever concern myself with that.
“I just want the better performance, more consistent, and continue to grow as a leader and make sure that there is a command to what we’re doing, that ‘This is the situation, this is the play.’ Those are the things that I’m focused on.”
The third overall selection in last year’s draft, Maye was thrown into the fire early in his rookie season. He did spend the first five weeks of 2024 as a backup to Jacoby Brissett, but then-head coach Jerod Mayo and his staff eventually decided to make the switch to the youngster.
Since then, Maye has been New England’s undisputed QB1. He also has had the weight of a franchise and an entire fan base’s hopes on his shoulders ever since.
It is clear that the 23-year-old wants to live up to the expectations. Doing so, however, will require him to learn to deal with...
