Give Drake Maye credit: When he makes a mistake, he bounces back and keeps battling. It’s a trait that The Greg Hill Show’s Courtney Cox highlighted Monday morning as one that makes her a believer in Maye.
When New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel joined the show Monday morning for his weekly Patriots Monday appearance, he agreed that Maye’s resiliency is admirable. He just wishes Maye didn’t have to be resilient as often as he does. Listen to the full interview above.
“Those are good qualities. We just can't keep testing it over and over and over again,” Vrabel said of Maye. “But I do appreciate the resiliency of him and this football team and our ability to continue to fight and continue to stay in it and compete. It just has to be cleaner so that we're not always in that situation.”
The Patriots committed five turnovers in Sunday’s 21-14 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers, their most in a game since 2008. Maye was responsible for two of them, throwing a killer interception in the end zone at the end of the first half, and then losing a fumble on New England’s second-to-last drive of the game with 7:48 to go.
On the interception, Vrabel said Maye needed to get more loft on the throw so it wasn’t tipped at the line.
“It shouldn't have been a flat one,” Vrabel said of the throw. “Obviously, just having an idea of where that guy is and be able to put some air under it. I think that those are things we have to be able to see. And again, get the spacing that we need and be able to keep it out of harm's way.”
On the fumble, Vrabel said Maye obviously needs to protect the ball, but he also placed blame on the offensive line, seeming to suggest that one or two linemen didn’t block through the end of the play.
“We have to either get down and be OK to take a loss, or be able to get rid of the football in times where it's loose,” Vrabel said. “And again, there's opportunities for guys to finish. I don't know how long the guy is going to have the football. That's why we say we have to finish longer than the guy with the ball. And there's a lot of examples of that, and thinking that the play is over, and sometimes the play isn't over. So, it's easy to say, ‘Well, you gotta have better ball security.’ And it's going to be really easy for me to say, ‘We have to finish longer than the guy with the ball,’ because we did it on numerous occasions.”
The Patriots had committed just one turnover in their first two games, so they will be hoping to show moving forward that Sunday's five-turnover loss was more of an aberration than the norm.