Patriots film review: How Drake Maye, Mike Vrabel took another step toward being playoff ready

Thursday night was nothing if not expected The Patriots entered as -point favorites against the Jets They won by Drake Maye entered as an MVP favorite He heard M-V-P chants throughout the night while slinging more than two dozen completions in another sparkling performance The Patriots defense also played to its reputation allowing yet another opening-drive touchdown before holding the Jets to one points for the rest of the meeting Now sure The Jets are not to be confused with any type of juggernaut measuring-stick opponent or anything other than a division doormat But the thing about midseason football is teams are either reinforcing good habits or letting them slip Playing clean football as the Pats did Thursday with zero turnovers two penalties and high passing efficiency matters because clean football will be required if they want to win come January The more often the Patriots play well now the more likely it is they will be at their best when their best is required in the playoffs And Thursday night even in a boring contest against a bad opponent with a predictable script under dreary conditions represented another step in that direction And nothing right now aside from winning is more critical to the Patriots than solidifying the habits that will help them win later on Here s what else the film revealed about the Pats latest win Drake Maye Foxboro MA - Nov - New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye looks for the pass as New York Jets linebacker Quincy Williams moves in during the second half at Gillette Stadium Photo By Matt Stone Boston Herald -of- for yards TD Accurate throw percentage Under pressure -of- for yards TD sack Against the blitz -of- for yards Behind the line N A - yards downfield -of- for yards - yards downfield -of- for yards TD yards downfield -of- for yards Notes No screens A below-average play-action rate Just two scrambles Thursday night evidenced Maye shouldering the offense as a pure passer as much as any contest this season He routinely took what was available to him based on the coverage and relentlessly attacked weak defenders whenever the Jets played man-to-man Even well-covered receivers were open the way Maye put the ball ahead of his targets against man and on the right shoulder to get them to settle versus zone Maye was not fooled pre-snap either picking the Jets apart underneath on three- and five-step drops He did struggle to connect with receivers deep though not all incompletions were his fault Patriots teammates crowd back Drake Maye s MVP circumstance in win over Jets This file is auto-generated function d l use strict l querySelector d addEventListener undefined typeof URL d wp d wp d wp receiveEmbedMessage d wp receiveEmbedMessage function e var t e content if t t secret t message t value a-zA-Z - test t secret for var s r n a l querySelectorAll 'iframe data-secret ' t secret ' ' o l querySelectorAll 'blockquote data-secret ' t secret ' ' c new RegExp https i i i