A 1-2 start to the 2026 season has left many questions for New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel to try and answer.
The biggest? Getting Drake Maye back on track.
Through three games, Maye has thrown six interceptions in addition to losing a fumble. Decision-making seems to be the biggest issue early on for the quarterback, who was pulled in the fourth quarter of Sunday’s 35-6 blowout loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars.
“I think quarterbacks want to make plays. I think they want to throw touchdowns.
I think sometimes when Greg and I go golfing, we really want to make a good score, right? Sometimes we’re so focused on it, we try to choke the life out of the golf club, and we’re squeezing it so damn tight that the ball has no choice but to go sideways,” Vrabel said Monday morning on WEEI’s The Greg Hill Show.
“We need to stop trying to choke the life out of every single play. We need to relax. We need to settle in and go play football and not try to force things that aren’t there.”
Later in the day, Vrabel was asked how he goes about addressing that issue while also raising Maye’s confidence level.
“Confidence comes from your preparation, and it comes from going out there. I can’t manufacture confidence. I can’t just say, ‘Hey, be confident.’ You have to practice. You have to hit those plays in practice, and you have to feel good about it,” Vrabel said.
“Sometimes you want to do something so badly. It’s like the tighter you hold the golf club, the more crooked it goes when you hit it. We just have to be able to make sure that we’re on the same page, that everybody knows what is expected of them, have a few details and then go play football.”
Following Sunday’s game, Maye said there was nothing wrong with his right shoulder that was injured in last year’s AFC Championship Game. However, the quarterback didn’t say there weren’t lingering effects from the hit.
Vrabel, meanwhile, said he was not aware of any ongoing injury concerns before adding he doesn’t “anticipate that being an issue going forward.”
Now, with the head coach looking for answers ahead of next Sunday’s showdown with the Buffalo Bills, Vrabel was asked if simplifying the offense is necessary.
“When you have games like that throughout the entire team – how do you fix some things? You get back to the basics,” Vrabel said. “Again, we want to continue to impress upon the importance of what our identity is. We still have to build it. You have to put it out there. Before you can protect something, you have to build it. And we have to get back to the basics.
“So, some of that is, do you do less and try to do it better? Or do you go and you try to scheme up a bunch of stuff and hope you hit it? I think at the end of the day, there’s a great balance. I thought we had a couple of good scheme plays and we didn’t hit them. They made it and we didn’t. … So, I think to your question, you never want to go into a game when a guy is unsure, right? But how much we do, we’ll look at that, and we’ll look at everything that we can do to help us win here on the road.”
