Through three quarters against the defending Super Bowl champions on the road, Drake Maye was playing fine. He wasn't creating explosive plays, but he was playing mistake-free football and taking what the stingy Dark Side Defense was giving him, and he had the Patriots holding a 10-3 lead. By the time the fourth quarter started, he was 17 of 22 for 127 yards and a touchdown, and he had yet to take a sack while he'd scrambled four times for 33 yards.
He put the Patriots in position to win, driving them into range to extend their lead with a first-and-10 at Seattle's 46-yard line. And then disaster struck. Maye was intercepted on a deep ball on the second snap of the fourth quarter, and he was intercepted on each of New England's following two drives as well.
He went 6 of 11 for just 53 yards and three interceptions, while also taking three sacks in the fourth quarter alone. It was an epic collapse, and it ended with a totally inexplicable and inexcusable pick on a play where Maye had almost no chance to complete the pass to Mack Hollins. If he had simply thrown the ball out of bounds, it would have given the Pats a chance to kick the game-tying field goal to send the game into overtime.
JOSH JOBE TOE TAP INTNEvsSEA on NBC/PeacockStream on @NFLPlus pic.twitter.com/MrmQx0a3fo "It was just unacceptable," Maye said, via the postgame interview transcript. "We had a chance to send it to overtime, at the worst, and the only thing you could do was turn the ball over, and that's what I did." The game-ender was the culmination of what had progressively been happening before it, though. After taking what the defense gave him for three quarters, Maye seemingly got bored and tried to test the Seahawks deep down the field.
He threw into coverage that he shouldn't have tested three different times, and he came away with three picks. "I just stopped being patient. That was the big thing," Maye said.
"We were really good up to the point where I tried to force one down the sideline to Romeo (Doubs). We were patient and dumping it off and trying to move the chains, and we avoided a lot of three-and-outs, and that was something. We try to earn more plays and the explosives will come, so I just stopped being patient and made decisions that ended up, like I said, cost us the game." On the throw to Doubs, which was into double coverage and ended up being picked off by Nehemiah Pritchett, Maye had his checkdown option (backup running back Corey Kiner) open in the flat.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
