Jerod Mayo Makes it Clear the Patriots Have a Full Blown QB Competition Going On

Since it became obvious in the spring that the Eliot Wolf/Jerod Mayo administration were betting their future success on drafting and developing Drake Maye, but hedging that bet by signing Jacoby Brissett,t the conventional wisdom was that they planned to bring the rookie along slowly. It's certainly been mine. Maye is young. He's being brought into a system that has next to nothing with the one he quarterbacked at North Carolina. Brissett already knows it forwards and backwards from his time in Cleveland. Wolf and Mayo are new hires, which gives them a grace period to turn this program around. Put them all together and you can spell Brissett B-R-I-D-G-E. 

But then this week happened. Featuring joint practices and a preseason game against Philly. Maye went 9-for-his first 9 attempts at practice. Then started with two scoring drives in the game. More importantly, looked in command, demonstrated the skillset he showed in Chapel Hill, and seems to have already cleaned up the footwork issues the draft pundits were so concerned about:

If you're so inclined and have 3 1/2 minutes to spare, here's a great breakdown of his two best throws:

While Brissett had the kind of miscommunication on a high leverage red zone play that makes everyone lose confidence in a rookie. While Maye played a clean game and only missed on a throw or two. Which naturally led some to insist the time to make Maye the starter was five minutes ago:

In all honesty, this was a development I did not see coming. I'd braced myself for a long season of this team barely scraping by. Trying to adjust to a new offensive scheme. Led by a solid but not spectacular veteran. With the rookie standing on the sidelines in a hat with a Microsoft Surface in his giant puppy paws. 

But Mayo is having none of that. Today he made it perfectly clear the job is wide open:

Q: [Y]ou kind of raised a hypothetical in regard to the starting quarterback position, and there were some ifs involved in regard to Drake potentially beating Jacoby out. Do you see this as being a competition between the two of them right now as to who is going to be the starting quarterback against Cincinnati?

 JM: I do. We have three more days of training camp practices, and it's our job as coaches to evaluate. The competition isn't over. They're still going to go out there, and they have to show not only themselves and their coaches but also their teammates. So, it's definitely still a competition.

He's the Joker, talking about his organization doing a little "aggressive expansion" while snapping a pool cue over his knee. The last man standing gets the job. While dismissing my notion that they'd never put a rookie under center until they got the offensive line debacle sorted out. But that's not happening either:

Q: I know you've mentioned in the past that one of Drake Maye's positives is that he can make plays by himself and overcome some things around him. Would the offensive line ever be an impediment to maybe considering him as the starter or maybe not giving him as much time if you don't trust the line?

JM: For me, we always talk about competition, and that's at all spots. So even if Drake beats out Jacoby [Brissett], I mean, he earned that role. And we don't really take that into consideration when he's ready to go, and if he's better than Jacoby, then he'll play; he'll start.

Look, I chose my words in that headline carefully. I didn't go with the attention-grabbing buzzword "controversy," because we're a million light years away from a situation like that. This is just two competitors interviewing for the same job. May the better man win. Which is not something I'd even remotely be saying in mid-August. But Maye has been just that impressive over the last couple of weeks.

After a bit of digging around old posts I've written, I found that that the last time we were in this situation, it was resolved on August 31st. That was 2021, when the two quarterbacks vying to get the Final Rose were Cam Newton and Mac Jones. Mac of course beat out Cam in the Palindrome War despite the fact he had mostly practiced with the second stringers, which is the same situation Maye has been in. The major difference being that Newton was given his release that very day, and for better or worse (first better, then worse and absolute worst) this became Jones team. 

And since Mayo was on the coaching staff then, that time frame is probably the template we're looking at here. If they do make the switch to Maye before Week 1 rather than later, we're likely not to know until then. But just the fact it's actually a discussion now is a hell of a narrative given how steep Maye's learning curve looked, even as recently as the first week of camp. 

Personally, I'd be more excited to see it be Maye. But feel better about the idea of it being Brissett while a young offense (on Maye's touchdown run, the Pats had six rookies on the field) figures itself out. But either way, having two quarterbacks you trust is the best kind of problem for a 4-13 team to have. The next two weeks are going to be wild.