In his first year playing under offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels, quarterback Drake Maye started 21 games as he led the Patriots to the Super Bowl while finishing second in MVP voting.
After seeing what Maye was capable of during his breakout season, opposing defenses are now adjusting.
“There’s evidence of things he does, things he does in our offense, things we use him to do, how we use our players, etc,” McDaniels said Thursday. “I think there’s a natural progression in this league because the coaches
on the other teams, the players on the other teams are so talented and when you have a year like Drake did last year, there’s going to be a reaction and a response to that. And it’s been that way every year I’ve been in the league.”
As defenses have looked for ways to slow down Maye, a blueprint of sort has started to emerge. That basis of that plan: taking away Maye’s special ability to make plays down the field.
In the Patriots’ last five matchups, which have come against top defenses such as Seattle (twice), Denver, Houston and Los Angeles, Maye has faced two-high safeties just over 50% of the time. In the season opener, the Seahawks ran those split-safety looks at a 57% clip.
The result is forcing Maye to play a boring brand of football living in the underneath area of the field, which he did to start Week 1 and build a 10-0 lead before he admittedly lost his patience and fired three interceptions all down field. Based on those results, defenses have little reason to abandon that game plan against Maye moving forward.
“You might not be able to get them out of it,” McDaniels said. “It depends, I’d say, how productive you are with whatever you’re doing. The layman’s concept would be run it until they have to drop the safety down. Well, I mean, that’s not just the easiest thing to do all the time. And there’s a lot of different variables that go into what they do in split safeties and shell defense. So, you can try to be patient and do that. There’s also ways to try to throw it against those types of coverages to to be effective.
“I would say no matter what you do, you just got to try to continue moving the ball forward and make positive plays and eventually score enough points to potentially force a defense to adjust. If you don’t do that, there’s really no need to expect them to change wildly.”
As McDaniels noted, one of the best way to force a defense to bring the second safety down into the box is with a successful running game.
Dating back to last season, however, New England’s rushing attack has struggled. That trend continued in Week 1 in Seattle, as the Patriots’ backs finished with just 62 yards on 24 carries as they ranked last in the NFL in rush EPA.
“The running game is really about execution and toughness,” McDaniels said. “I thought our guys hung in there and we ended up having some of our best runs in the fourth quarter. And patience is important. So, if you’re going to hate a two-yard run in the first quarter, then you might not get to the 10th, 11th, 12th, 25th, 33rd run of the game.
“So, I’ve called a lot of games and sometimes I had a great, great, great, great mentor that told me that volume of runs is important to the overall average eventually — and that was Dante Scarnecchia. And so, if you’re sitting there and you want every run in the first quarter to be 4.5 yard average, you might be hoping and wishing for a while. In this league, it’s hard. But if you give us 23, 25, 32 runs, eventually some of those two, three yarders early might become four, five, six yards later. And so, if the game is in a state where you can maintain your balance and stay patient with it, eventually you hope that it bears more fruit.”
The Patriots next test will come in their home opener in Week 2 against the Pittsburgh Steelers, who played zone coverage on all of their defensive drop backs in Week 1 — a similar strategy defensive coordinator Patrick Graham used against the Patriots in Week 1 of last season with the Raiders.
While Maye stressed remaining patient under center following the season-opening loss, McDaniels is focused on a slightly different word as the Patriots learn how defenses will approach their quarterback this season: discipline.
That distinction will be important as they must remain ready to attack any opportunity that presents itself.
“I think what we’re going to find out as we go through this season is, people will do different things. We will see different things and it will require us to be, I would say, in my words, discipline because patience sounds like a passive word to me,” McDaniels said.
“The fine line there is protecting it and doing the right thing when they take things away from us and being really aggressive and not taking away one of [Maye’s] greatest attributes, which is to be able to do things down the field and be wonderful throwing the ball. So I think you can do both. I think we’ll see a development from him as he sees how people play him now differently. But this is an extremely exciting opportunity for us to live through this and to see the differences and then mature, grow, and continue to get better.”
