Sports Illustrated Drake Maye Gave An Emotional Mike Inkl

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 17, 2025, 5:52 PM

sports illustrated drake maye gave an emotional mike inkl

Sunday's win in Tennessee was an important one for the Patriots. Not only did the 31-13 victory see New England maintain its first-place lead in the AFC East—and Drake Maye breaking franchise records once held by Tom Brady—but it also allowed coach Mike Vrabel to... That's why, in the locker room after the win, the coach was awarded a game ball by his franchise quarterback while trying to break the team down. "One sec, one sec," Maye jumped in as Vrabel walked away from the huddle. "For coach and all Tennessee coaches. Coach Vrabel, we love playing for you.

Glad you're our head coach. We love you, coach." Check out the awesome moment here, at about the 0:35 second mark in the below video: FOXBOROUGH — While the Patriots came away with the win, there are plenty of areas for improvement. And one is specifically for Drake Maye, who turned the ball over twice. Specifically, in the second half, Maye was intercepted by Falcons safety Jessie Bates III on a pass intended for Hunter Henry.

Afterwards, it was clear Maye was frustrated; however, a video captured showed head coach Mike Vrabel going over, and he appeared to say some encouraging words. Both Maye and Vrabel were asked about this after the game. "Yeah. He’s great at coming up to me after really every drive. He comes over and says something to me, always positive, always wanting me to rally the guys around me, always challenging me to battle adversity and get the guys going," Maye explained. "I just appreciate the way he coaches me.

He’s hard on me, but he’s very positive, and he wants the best out of me. Everything that he says to me, I think it’s going to be important and become true." As for Vrabel, he made it clear that the past didn't matter and it was what Maye did next that was most important. Patriots quarterback Drake Maye may have just won the first game of his second NFL season, but he's thinking about his first-year coach Mike Vrabel first and foremost. After defeating the Dolphins 33-27 in a back-and-forth thriller, Maye revealed to reporters that he kept the game ball to give to Vrabel as a memento of the coach's first win at the helm. Specifically, Maye saved the football he used while kneeling out the clock, then handed that over to the Pats' equipment manager to give to Vrabel, per Boston Herald reporter Andrew Callahan.

Drake Maye saved the football he used to kneel the clock out today and handed it to the #Patriots lead equipment manager so Mike Vrabel could receive it in the post-game locker room to... pic.twitter.com/5rU6ay5tAY For New England, the win wasn't the sleekest win—but they got it done. Maye himself finished with 230 passing yards and two touchdowns, as well as one rushing TD. Don’t tell New England linebacker Robert Spillane that the Patriots aren’t right where they’re supposed to be. “It’s a brand new team,” the defensive captain said, from a victorious locker room in Tampa.

“I wasn’t here last year, so I had no expectations in terms of last year’s play for us this year.” But, I said to Spillane, you’ve been around the block. “I’ve been around the block—and even when I was 2–15 with the Raiders, I thought we were going to go 17–0 that year,” he said. “So I have some level of delusion, player delusion, you might think. I have an overwhelming sense of confidence in myself and in my teammates. I always have.

So I thought we’d be 10–0 right now. We’re 8–2, but every week it’s a battle in the NFL, and we’re just going to continue to battle.” Turns out, his guess of 10–0 was much closer to the mark than most people would’ve predicted. New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel did all he could last week to downplay the storyline related to the club's Week 7 game at the Tennessee Titans, the team that fired him in... Coming off New England's 31-13 win that improved the Patriots to 5-2, quarterback Drake Maye shared why he and others in the locker room appreciated what Vrabel did and didn't say ahead of the... "It meant a lot to us, him downplaying, not making a big deal…what’s interesting versus what’s important, and he cared about us," Maye said during a Monday appearance on Boston sports radio station WEEI,...

"He cared about his team, and he said that was in the past. Now he’s moved on, and he’s worried about us. Shoot, we love playing for coach." Vrabel went 54-45 across his six seasons with the Titans before he ended his tenure with back-to-back losing campaigns. He guided the franchise to the 2020 AFC Championship Game and later won the Associated Press Coach of the Year Award for the 2021 season. Despite what Vrabel said behind the scenes, Patriots players made it known on Sunday afternoon that they understood earning a win over the Titans meant "a lot" to their coach.

Meanwhile, Maye set a franchise record for the highest completion percentage in a single game when he connected on 21-of-23 pass attempts (91.3 percent) for 222 yards and two touchdowns against Tennessee. The New England Patriots went from having one of the greatest head coaches in football history to an unproven first-year head coach. They didn’t have a lot of talent on the roster either, so it was hardly surprising to see Jerod Mayo struggling so badly in his first and only year in the position. Then again, it also became painfully evident that he wasn’t cut out for the job, at least not right now. With that in mind, the front office went to great lengths to get a proven winner like Mike Vrabel in town. He hasn’t had much of a chance to sit down and get to work with Drake Maye.

If you’re looking for sources of frustration from the Patriots‘ 21-14 loss to the Steelers in Week 3 on their home field, there is no shortage of candidates to pick from. Five turnovers in a game in which you still have a chance to win has that effect. But probably no frustration, with a day to process what happened on Sunday, looms greater than what happened just before halftime, when the Patriots had shaken off a 14-0 deficit to cut the lead... There, though, the Patriots ran three passing plays, the last of which ended with a Drake Maye interception int eh end zone. As he has done since becoming the coach back in January, Mike Vrabel was pretty hard on Maye after having watched the play. On WEEI in Boston on Monday morning, Vrabel was asked whether the throw should have been to the pylon.

“It shouldn’t have been a flat one,” Vrabel said. “Obviously, just having an idea of where that guy is and being able to put some air under it. Those are things we have to be able to see. Get the spacing that we need and be able to keep it out of harm’s way.” Frustration with the play stems from the fact that Kayshon Boutte, who has been the Patriots‘ top receiver, was free heading into the corer of the end zone. As Vrabel said, Maye tried to zip the ball to Boutte, allowing Steelers lineman Cam Heyward to get a finger on it and giving defensive back Brandin Echols the chance to slide back into...

Week 6 is rolling along, with two games to come on Monday. Here’s what we’ve got for you in this mid-October edition of the MMQB takeaways … Drake Maye has been a revelation over the past six weeks. And I don’t know if he’ll be able to sustain this wild start, the way Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson did in their second years as pros, or win like Joe Burrow did in... But I do know now that this is more than the Patriots, in Mike Vrabel’s first year, winning with Maye at quarterback. The Patriots are winning because of Maye at quarterback.

That’s an important distinction, one that separates good players at the most crucial position from the truly great ones. It also explains why, and how, the Patriots have as many wins on Columbus Day (four) as they had during the entirety of Bill Belichick’s final year in Foxborough or Jerod Mayo’s only year... The stats tell some of the story. After a so-so season-opening loss to the Raiders, Maye’s been on a heater, posting five triple-digit passer ratings in as many games, while throwing nine touchdown passes and one pick. Over that five-game stretch, Sunday’s 69.2% completion rate was his lowest, and he joined Patrick Mahomes, Dan Marino and Dak Prescott as the only quarterbacks under 24 with five consecutive games of 200 yards...

Sports Illustrated Drake Maye Gave An Emotional Mike Inkl

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