Drake Maye will find it easier to lead Patriots after MVP-caliber season

FOXBORO, Mass. — This time last year, Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel was still pushing quarterback Drake Maye as a leader.

It already feels like that will be less of an emphasis in Year 2 of Vrabel and Maye’s partnership. Maye felt like he had to earn a vocal leadership role, and he did just that in a season in which he finished second in NFL MVP voting and first in passer rating, QBR, completion percentage and yards per attempt.

“I think the biggest thing I kept on saying last year was like, ‘I feel like I need to do something in this league before I start.’ And they kept on pushing me, said, ‘You got to expect that to happen.’ So I definitely got some more comfort in that area of pushing the guys,” Maye said Saturday at training camp. “And think I need to do it more and celebrating and be louder and show my personality more. I think the guys will see that naturally. So I think that’s what camp’s for, and you build through it, and you kind of get to new levels, and that’s the best thing about spending every day all day with each other.”

Celebrating moments is big for Vrabel. But he also wants his quarterback to take the blame if things don’t go right.

“If we don’t celebrate, I’ll be telling him to run down there and celebrate,” Vrabel said. “Even though we scored a few touchdowns last year, don’t take those for granted. It’s really hard. I can try to put myself in his position or any player’s position that I’m coaching. There’s a lot on his plate, and he’s focusing on doing the right thing and being as perfect as he can be and puts a lot on himself, and then it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, just threw a touchdown.’ But it’s like, ‘No, like we’re gonna go celebrate.’

“I think you can really define yourself as a leader by how you handle yourself and your teammates when things aren’t great, and it’s easy to go celebrate. But it’s harder to stand up there and say, ‘You know what? I screwed up. I might have made a mistake in a huddle, which caused another player not to do his job. And even I was able to adjust for my mistake in the huddle or miscommunication, but this other player had something else in his mind, and that led him to go the wrong way.’ And when you stand up and say, ‘Hey, you know what? That’s on me,’ takes a lot of pressure off everybody else. So excited about where Drake’s going to be, and just his growth.”

Just because Maye grew as a leader and a player last season doesn’t mean the Patriots are going to stop pushing him to improve.

The Patriots placed a greater emphasis on Maye calling his own plays at the line of scrimmage during the spring.

Now in training camp, the Patriots are trying to function quicker as an offense. And it helps that for the first time since 2021, the Patriots will have the same offensive system in place in consecutive seasons.

“Just continue to try to operate and be more urgent and get everybody just functioning just a little bit quicker,” Vrabel said when asked how he can continue to push Maye. “And we don’t want to go fast. Whether we huddle or we go on the ball, whatever that looks like, to be able to try to dictate the defense a little bit, and not just — the urgency in which we operate, I think, is something that we’ve all talked about.”

The Patriots were 28th in seconds per play, per Evan Lazar of Patriots.com. Maye would like to see the Patriots run more plays on offense.

“I think it’s getting us in the right play first,” Maye said. “I think getting set under center, getting ready to get in the gun. I think just moving faster when we got a good play that we like against the defense. Just train our guys to be, ‘Hey, once we get down on the football and get set, we’re going.’ I think that’s the best thing. We kind of did a lot of great things on offense. We had a bunch of statistics; we did a bunch of things high in the league. I think just creating more plays. I think we can even create more plays, snap the ball earlier in the play clock, and get some things going.”

The Patriots ranked second in scoring and third in total offense last season, but the sky’s the limit this season after adding A.J. Brown and Romeo Doubs at receiver and improving their offensive line.

Urgency isn’t the only thing Vrabel wants to see Maye improve in this season.

“The communication, always taking care of the ball,” Vrabel said. “We talked about the games that we lost last year. You know, whether that was the quarterback rating. Josh Allen had a better rating than Drake, and that’s just not on the quarterback. That’s, defensively, our ability to affect their quarterback, our ability to help our quarterback.

“Whether it was the Pittsburgh game where the turnover margin wasn’t where we needed to be, that’s the reason that we lost that game.

“And obviously in the Super Bowl, the turnover margin and their ability to run the football and our ability not to be able to run the football, and then we get into all the different critical situations: two-minute, five-minute. Buffalo being able to set the table a little better on special teams. Their kickoff return was much better than ours was, so those are all things that we look at that we’re going to focus on, and that’s how we want to practice, and that’s how we want to play.”

Maye tried to make a splash with his first throw in training camp Saturday, targeting Brown in 1-on-1 coverage against top cornerback Christian Gonzalez.

Maye’s pass hit Brown in the hand and fell incomplete.

“I was going to try to start off the camp with a bang, but I gotta make a better throw for him,” Maye said.

The rest of practice went better for Maye, who finished 6 of 9 and hit wide receiver Kayshon Boutte down the left sideline for a chunk play.

Maye revealed after practice that he hosted teammates in North Carolina for three days of pre-camp practice reps.

“It was good to have those guys there, and I think it’s huge in the offseason, kind of right before camp to get guys going,” Maye said. “I feel like we had a good group and some good sessions, and it was fun work.”

It was already starting to show on Saturday with improved connections with his receivers on Day 1 of camp. The Patriots still have a month and a half to go until the start of the regular season, a Super Bowl LX rematch against the Seahawks.