Drake Maye and the MVP award, Mike Vrabel as coach of the year, the truth about players and individual honors, windows in sports, football and illiteracy

Monday 12/29/25

Drake Maye was close to perfect yesterday. What else can you say about a quarterback who goes 19-for-21 for 256 yards, five TD passes and no interceptions, for a 157 rating?

Okay, the Jets are bad and on top of that they barely showed up, but it's still an NFL game. Call it a late MVP push from Maye. I don't think he can overcome the narrative/career recognition boost that Matthew Stafford has going for him/will get, but there are stats are very similar.

Stafford has the better TD-Int ratio--and has thrown for 40 touchdowns to Maye's 30--but Maye has a slightly higher QB rating as of today and has completed more than 71% of his passes--that's a big number staring back at you--which is six percent more than Stafford. And it's not as if Maye simply checks down and is tossing it three yards to the running back.

To me, Maye has been the most valuable player in the league. He's meant the most to his team. By a wide margin in my view. Maye was single-handedly winning games for the Patriots before they knew what they were as a team or who they could be. They built off of his foundation.

I know how voters will think. They'll go with the idea that Maye has plenty of time to win individual honors. Okay. But when you get really close, you usually just get close the once. Unless you're Gretzky or Manning or Jordan. Brady.

I'm not saying Maye won't get close again or a bunch. Or that he won't win one or two or hell, three. I don't know. Still don't know who he is in terms of that type of thing. I just know he's been dynamite on balance this year.

The Raiders game was rough and if Maye had even by a C- Drake Make in the second half--or, hell, D+ Drake Maye--in the second half of the second Bills game, the Patriots would have won. But he was the reason for a bunch of wins on his own, and he's the biggest reason--on the field, anyway--for the team's turnaround.

I do give Maye more of a chance than I would have before. Like a twenty-five percent chance. It wouldn't shock me if the voters did award him the MVP. I'd be mildly surprised.

After the game yesterday on the postgame show, I listened to Ted Johnson and others tell me that Drake Maye doesn't care about being the MVP and winning Super Bowls is what matters most to him and is all that matters, blah blah blah.

I don't believe that for a second. People won't like this probably, but I believe the individual honor almost always means more to the player. That's what gets you paid. I don't believe any elite player wants to sacrifice numbers and be paid less if that means winning a title. You'll be criticized for having more pedestrian numbers.

At the same time, the player--like a Drake Maye--should still say the right thing. What floors me, though, is that people can't understand how someone would know the right thing to say, say the right thing, but also know what the deal is in their head. That's not even be savvy--it's more like not being stupid.

MVP is huge. A player like Maye would never trade having a QB rating of 85 and throwing for 3300 yards per season and winning three Super Bowls that way over lighting it up, winning a couple MVPs, and no Super Bowls. You'd be paid a lot less for the former instead of the latter, for one thing.

Why do you think Josh Allen makes the money he makes? Which doesn't mean the Bills organization doesn't believe he can't win a Super Bowl or that he won't. But you aren't paid for Super Bowl victories. Not at the quarterback position. You're paid for being the man and putting up the numbers. And other things like your age.

But come on. In hockey, do you think Connor McDavid would command the money he does if he was a first line center who averaged 83 points a year and captained his team to two Cups or if he can go for 150 points and win Hart and Art Ross trophies and has no Cups?

You think these players don't care about that? This isn't the age of Tommy Henrich 1940s New York Yankees.

Maye knows what to say, and guys like Ted Johnson are obtuse enough to believe it. Maye is the same player who said he didn't want to be "Check down Charlie." He's winning right now on his terms, which means throwing the ball down the field. Let's be smart.

What has impressed me most about Maye this year? One thing stands out the most: How quickly he learns. He improves at a fast rate. Corrects flaws from one week to the next. It's very noticeable. And also reassuring moving forward.

The Patriots went 8-0 on the road, which is notable and something that can get lost/overlooked. This is a rare achievement. Having said that, they're 5-3 at home, which isn't what you want to see. I can't see them losing to the Dolphins so they'll likely finish at 6-4 at Gillette, but this is a kind of a weird home-road split, though I don't think it means too much. More fluky than anything.

As I wrote in these pages, I didn't mind the Bills loss. Saw it as something that could have been good for the Patriots. A game to learn from. And I don't seem them as a juggernaut team capable of ripping off fifteen wins in a row like the Patriots teams of 2003 and 2004.

I had reservations about Patriots coach Mike Vrabel that I expressed after the team's season-opener against the Raiders, but he's the coach of the year. Anything else won't be right. You have to look at the context. The Patriots have had three coaches in three years. The two prior to Vrabel both went 4-13. Then a new guy comes in--this third guy in as many seasons--and you're 13-3 with a game left?

That's just too much of a shift for Vrabel not to be the coach of the year. It's too dramatic a swing. And it's not just one coach before him who was 4-13, it was two, one of whom is supposed to be the best coach in the history of the sport. It should be Vrabel's award.

Here's an intriguing thought: If the over/under was one on how many more times a team with Drake Maye as its quarterback will win at least 13 regular season games, are you taking it? I wouldn't if it were still a sixteen-game schedule.

People assume that the thing that happens early will be the thing that happens repeatedly, but history shows us that it normally doesn't work that way. Eleven years from now, you could be looking at Maye's page on football-reference and see that 2025 number of regular season wins of (presumably) 14 and no number as high as it in all the seasons that followed.

For all the talk of windows and how long they're going to be open, the truth is you need to go through them ASAP when they are open. Don't get me wrong--I hope Maye and the Pats win three Super Bowls and have a bunch of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen win seasons. Of course I do. I've been a Patriots fan my entire life and always will be. I grew up within a Hail Mary heave of that now long gone dump of a stadium in Foxborough. Next town over.

But I know how these things tend to work. And for great teams, too. Look at the 1985 Bears. The Mets of the 1980s. There's a lot of competition, and other people have their day, to be knocked aside by others having theirs. Which makes Brady all the more remarkable. I don't believe people understand how remarkable, because I know they don't have the understanding of history, even if we're just talking sports history in this case.

The Bills lost 13-12 to the Eagles last night after electing to go for the two-point conversion rather than tie the game with an extra point. I get the decision. The Eagles' defense had the Bills' offense pretty well bottled up.

The thing with these 2025 Bills is that they seem to go exactly as far as Josh Allen can get them to go. It's a one-man band. They're so Allen dependent. The Patriots need Maye to be Maye, but the Bills need Allen to be Allen even more. Or that's my impression watching them this year. Right from that first game of the season, with the huge comeback engineered by Allen at his best.

That feels like a fatal flaw to me, but watch the Bills find a way to win it all. I don't have much of a read on who the eventual Super Bowl winner will be. I see a bunch of teams with a more or less equal shot, including the Patriots.

The Pittsburgh Steelers couldn't get out of their own way yesterday and managed to lose to the Browns. All they needed to do was beat a lowly Cleveland squad and they were in the playoffs and they couldn't get it done. Which means the Steelers and Ravens play next week to determine the division champ and who makes it to the postseason. The AFC North and the NFC South are like the old Norris Division in the NHL where the "best" team is basically a .500 squad.

Average NFL fan in the United States:

I have lost all respect for the President along with his administration! My one escape has always been watching the NFL on CBS, FOX and NBC. Especially my Pats! I have been pissed that the NFL is now moving towards paid streaming services. And today, I just turned on FOX to watch my Pats, to find out that Fios is in disbute with Cox and the game is blacked out!!!! Total BS!!!

That "disbute" isn't a typo--trust me, that's how this person--a middle-aged adult--thinks it's spelled.

Our collective addiction to football and the inability to step away from it--save towards Netflix--is making us dumber and dumber and life for those who have yet to come along much worse than it would have been. People are dependent on this shit for anything to do in their lives, and I'm hesitant to use that term.

You think I sit here doing nothing but watching football? And yet, this is the person who knows the most about these things, as has been proven many times over. But we just sit there and sit there and sit there and sit there and get on social media and repeat the same moronic phrases and complain about the officials.

The amazing thing is, most people who watch football don't even have a clue what they're watching. They have no idea what's going on save for what the score happens to be. Football helps fuel our national illiteracy. I'd say it's amazing to me that more isn't made of this, but who's smart enough at this juncture to be able to tell what anything is? So more football it is then.