The Patriots Are Right Not to Start Drake Maye Too Early

New England is not in a position to develop a rookie quarterback in game action right now. It’s better to throw Jacoby Brissett out there than risk ruining a potential franchise player.

Maye got sacked during his NFL debut, which came in garbage time Thursday. / Robert Deutsch-Imagn Images

With about six minutes to go in the first half of Thursday’s New York Jets–New England Patriots game, Jacoby Brissett rushed into a play-action drop that became frantic almost instantaneously. The Jets’ surge off the line immediately knocked the Patriots’ front five backward. Defensive back Michael Carter II was brought in as an extra rusher and was in the backfield so quickly that Patriots running back Antonio Gibson had to abandon the idea of faking a handoff and moving toward Carter to prevent the blitzing defensive back from crushing Brissett. 

It was the third sack of the half, one of five Brissett took on the night, during a game that began with an obvious disadvantage for the Patriots (it got so bad that five Patriots defenders could not stop a two-man Jets pass rush on a pre-halftime Hail Mary attempt). Even without Jermaine Johnson (Achilles injury) and Haason Reddick (contract dispute), the Jets’ deep stable of talented pass rushers was always going to heavily impact a Patriots offensive line that has seen both injury and bizarre departures perforate an already talent-starved front. (For good measure, one more stat describing the Patriots’ offensive futility: Their four first downs in the first half were the fewest any Patriots team has had in an opening half since 2000.)

For Brissett, this is nothing new. With the Indianapolis Colts in 2017, he was sacked 10 times in a game against the Jacksonville Jaguars. He was sacked another eight times in one game against the Tennessee Titans a few weeks later. Despite that, he has remained a sought-after veteran bridge starter and backup, having developed during New England’s salad days before being cast away and returning this season.  

But on a night such as Thursday’s 24–3 loss, Brissett was essential because—until the final four minutes of garbage time—the person not taking those hits, not running those dead-on-arrival plays and not trying to outmaneuver the inevitable doom was rookie Drake Maye, the No. 3 pick in the draft and quarterback of the future. Down in Carolina, the Panthers have benched Bryce Young after Young’s hardwiring was short-circuited over the course of 18 mostly bleak starts. Before Young arrived, Carolina traded its two best offensive skill-position players (Christian McCaffrey and DJ Moore) and replaced that firepower with an end-of-career Adam Thielen. The mismanagement of the roster was so poor that the club’s general manager (and de facto human shield for notoriously impatient and overly-involved owner David Tepper) was fired after last season, along with the interim head coach. To be clear, by the way, I don’t think Young’s predicament has anything to do with the current coaching staff, and was an accumulation of bad habits developed in his rookie season from a scattershot and disjointed coaching staff, and a front office that profoundly failed those coaches in supplying starting-caliber players. Those issues snowballed to new coach Dave Canales’s doorstep in 2024 and he was doing what was best for Young in pulling the quarterback. 

New England’s roster is not nearly as ruined as Carolina’s, but the franchise has wisely avoided what has become an absolute pitfall for teams that were bad enough to earn—or need to trade up for—a top-five pick to select a quarterback. 

Taking a beating in a game like this used to be a foolish rite of passage for rookies. Coaches like to use the phrase “drinking from a firehose” to describe the mass quantities of information and experiences their players have to digest in a short amount of time, without mentioning that the method has drowned countless talented players who have entered the league and washed out without a reasonable opportunity to grow. Games such as Thursday can have an incredibly deleterious effect on a still-developing player, forcing a rookie to develop skittish habits, opening the door for an injury that rookies are more likely to try to gut through and exposing them to having their confidence harpooned. 

The quarterback position demands a ridiculous martyrdom that seems to creep into the psyche of the player over time. After so many instances of getting beaten down and taking public accountability for said beatdowns—wake me up when it’s cool for a quarterback to analyze the GM’s draft record—it becomes hard to separate oneself from failure, even when the dividing line is clear to anyone with a brain. 

The further we get into an era of common sense, the more concrete the path to success looks: Do not put the quarterback in until the roster is at least good enough to support him at minimum and elevate him at best. Or, if you cannot help yourself, do what New England did Thursday and give Maye just an in-moderation taste of what the end of a tail-whooping could be like.  

At some point, Young will be a productive starter in the NFL. He’ll join a group of other highly drafted players such as Geno Smith, Baker Mayfield and Sam Darnold, who were given a respite from their own hellscapes.

New England is hoping that Maye can be good … in New England. And that process will be difficult. The Patriots appeared on a treadmill to nowhere Thursday, and it may have felt worthwhile to some people to get Maye a full, official start, get him acclimated to game preparation and the speed of a professional regular-season game. But this more cautious approach will be worthwhile when Maye begins his career in earnest in a position when he is less likely to be shellacked on every down. To actually play football, which, unfortunately for Brissett, was never in the cards Thursday.