Patriots quarterback Drake Maye has a chance to dazzle in London against the 1-5 Jaguars
Maye has started all of one game, elevating hopes with his three-touchdown performance in the Patriots' 41-21 loss to the Texans.
Welcome to Season 13, Episode 7 of the Unconventional Preview, a serious yet lighthearted, nostalgia-tinted look at the Patriots’ weekly matchup . . .
Go ahead and admit it, and I’ll admit it right there with you.
Weren’t you really hoping to wake up Sunday morning for a showdown in London between Drake Maye . . . and Mac Jones?
All right, so showdown is probably too strong of a word, given that Maye, the Patriots’ Great Quarterback Hope of the Present, and Jones, the Patriots’ Not-So-Great Quarterback Hope of the Recent Past, play for 1-5 teams.
Maye has started all of one game, elevating hopes with his three-touchdown (and yes, three-turnover) performance in the 41-21 loss to the Texans, their most compelling 20-point loss in ages.
Jones, meanwhile, was packaged up and shipped to his hometown Jaguars for a sixth-round pick after an all-hope-is-lost third season with the Patriots in 2023 — the nadir actually coming in London in Week 10, a 10-6 loss to the Colts in which he turned a sure-fire touchdown pass into an alley-ooped interception.
Jones is now the backup to enigmatic former No. 1 overall pick Trevor Lawrence, a role that should suit him with one team or another for the next half-dozen years. He’s in a better place now, for him and, especially, for the Patriots.
Now, it’s not as if we were wishing an injury on Lawrence, who has thrown for 1,338 yards, with eight touchdowns and three interceptions for Jacksonville’s 19th-ranked offense (319.5 yards per game). But the Patriots’ defense is kind of deserving of an opportunity to play against the quarterback who kept putting them in lousy field position over and over again last season.
Without a Maye-Jones matchup, Patriots fans will have to settle for the satisfaction of watching the rookie No. 3 overall pick continue to prove in his second start what he demonstrated in his first: He is more talented and likable than his predecessor in every way.
Oh, sure, Maye is raw. Those three turnovers are evidence enough (though his second interception wasn’t his fault). But his talents — including legitimate playmaking ability on the run and the ability to snap off a 40-yard strike with ease — were obvious against a Texans team that must be considered on the short list of Super Bowl contenders.
Against the Jaguars, who allow a league-worst 276.7 yards per game in the air? Maye — who, believe it or not, has just three fewer touchdown passes than Patrick Mahomes this season — has a chance to dazzle, presuming the Patriots’ makeshift offensive line can keep him upright.
This much is already certain: Watching him play quarterback already beats every alternative the Patriots have run out there since Tom Brady was allowed to fly south to Tampa.
Kick it off, Slye, and let’s get this thing started . . .
Three players worth watching other than the quarterbacks
Marte Mapu: It’s going to be fascinating to look back in a couple of years and assess Bill Belichick’s final draft class with the Patriots.
Christian Gonzalez, who slid to No. 17 overall in 2023, is drawing high praise from the receivers he covers as one of the league’s better cornerbacks. (Gonzalez struggled by his standards against the Texans, but Stefon Diggs — not one to dole out unearned praise — called him “very impressive” afterward.)
Second-round pick Keion White is a budding force on the defensive line, albeit one with a knack for making undisciplined-to-knuckleheaded decisions.
Fourth-rounder Chad Ryland was one of Belichick’s silliest picks. A team with so many needs shouldn’t have been taking a kicker, and he was cut after one scattershot season.
But about that third-round pick, Mapu, the safety-linebacker hybrid from Sacramento State. Now he’s interesting, and maybe the tipping point on how we ultimately judge the entirety of that draft.
Mapu looked like something between a reach and a luxury in his rookie season, playing all 17 games but just 18 percent of the defensive snaps. He began this season on injured reserve with a calf injury, returning for the Week 5 matchup with the Dolphins.
Mapu made seven tackles that game and forced a fumble, and he’s become downright essential with Jabrill Peppers’s arrest that weekend, which subsequently landed him on the Commissioner’s Exempt list.
Mapu, whose relentless style is somewhat reminiscent of Peppers, played well again against the Texans, sharing a sack with Christian Elliss and contributing five tackles.
With another strong game Sunday, it might be time to start wondering if Belichick left the Patriots with another defensive building block.
Brian Thomas Jr.: The Jaguars snagged the Louisiana State star and Malik Nabers’s running mate with the No. 23 pick in the ‘24 draft, 14 spots before the Patriots took Ja’Lynn Polk.
Thomas dropped a touchdown pass last week in the Jaguars’ loss to the Bears, but overall he’s been excellent, with 25 catches for 424 yards (ninth-most in the NFL) and three touchdowns, including an 85-yarder in Week 5 against the Colts.
Tank Bigsby: With Travis Etienne dealing with a hamstring injury, maybe this is the week that Jaguars coach Doug Pederson realizes that Bigsby — who has rushed 41 times for 297 yards, a preposterous 7.2 yards per carry — is his best running back.
The flashback
Two of the Patriots’ 11 Super Bowl trips during their 65-year history have come via AFC Championship game victories over the Jaguars.
The most recent — and one you and Myles Jack probably remember vividly — occurred in January 2018, when a pair of Danny Amendola touchdown receptions in the fourth quarter rallied the Patriots from a 10-point deficit to a 24-20 win.
But the first, during the 1996 season, might have been even more memorable.
While some of the bones of the future dynasty were already in place — Ty Law, Tedy Bruschi, and Willie McGinest, not to mention assistant coach Bill Belichick — a second trip to the Super Bowl for the franchise still seemed like a daydream that would remain as such, at least until the upstart Jaguars knocked off John Elway and the potent Broncos in the divisional round.
(Tom Brady, for the record, was a freshman at Michigan. He completed three passes for 26 yards and an interception in two games. The future GOAT was just a kid.)
That young defense came through late in the Patriots’ 20-6 victory, forcing three turnovers in the final four minutes, including safety Willie “Big Play” Clay’s interception of a Mark Brunell pass after the Jaguars had marched the New England 5-yard line with 3:43 left.
Wrote the great Nick Cafardo in his game story that day:
“In the end, even nicknames became contagious.
“Big Play.
“That used to be the exclusive property of free safety Willie Clay. And in truth, it applied again yesterday.”
“But when someone calls out Big Play now, several more Patriots would be justified in answering,” Cafardo added, citing Bruschi, cornerback Otis Smith, and receiver Shawn Jefferson, among others.
Patriots fans who were around for that era will remember that Clay’s Big Play nickname sometimes had an unflattering double connotation, and he did get cooked for a long touchdown in their 35-21 Super Bowl XXXI loss to the Packers.
But that AFC Championship game win over the Jaguars? Let’s just leave it at this: Clay’s good kind of big play was the signature moment— save for perhaps a brief power outage and a cloying Kraft speech — on what was one of the best days in franchise history to that point.
Grievance of the week
Polk is not helping the case that Eliot Wolf was right to take a receiver he believed in during the second-round of the 2024 draft rather than reaching for a tackle that he may not have.
Polk was downright bad in last week’s loss to the Texans, catching just 1 of 4 targets for 4 yards. You don’t have to have a doctorate in Next Gen Stats to recognize that averaging a single yard per target is less than ideal. Polk also had a crucial drop on a perfect third-and-5 throw from Maye in the fourth quarter.
It was Polk’s first career start, and yet the second straight game in which he seemed to be trending in the wrong direction. He had just one catch on six targets for 13 yards in the Week 5 loss to the Dolphins. On the season, he has 10 receptions on 23 targets for 78 yards, with one touchdown, which came in the Week 2 loss to the Seahawks. He also has three drops.
Polk should be developing a connection with Maye, much like second-year receivers DeMario Douglas and Kayshon Boutte — each of whom caught a touchdown pass against the Texans — already are doing.
Instead, Polk is getting called out by his coach to “get over this mental hump.” It was hard to tell whether Polk’s claim in midweek comments to MassLive that he “has the best hands in the league” was irrational confidence or an attempt to mask self-doubt.
One of the Patriots’ priorities in a season in which the No. 1 mission is to develop building blocks for the future is to have their top two picks in the 2024 draft develop chemistry. They won’t have many better opportunities to do so than this week — the Jaguars’ pass defense is last in the NFL.
Polk doesn’t need to excel — promising if imperfect performances would be fine. The last two weeks, he’s been a long way from even that.
Prediction, or how the heck did Belichick ever lose a Super Bowl to Doug Pederson?
Question: How many more wins do you think the Patriots will muster (provided they can keep Maye from making a weekly appearance on the injury report) over the final 11 games? Four? Three? Two? They could win at Tennessee. Might beat the Colts at Gillette. They’ll probably steal another AFC East game or two.
I’m going to say three more. And one of them is coming Sunday morning. When it’s over, and the Patriots win because of their offense for once, we won’t go so far as to call this Maye Mania. But we sure will appreciate the beacon of hope. Patriots 34, Jaguars 27.
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com