FOXBORO — Mike Vrabel has been complimentary (appropriately) of his MVP candidate at quarterback. Particularly as the season has gone on, as the Patriots built up one of the best records in the NFL, Vrabel has been more than willing to provide Drake Maye his flowers.
He did so again Monday, explaining why he thinks Maye is deserving of MVP honors.
“He’s extremely accurate,” Vrabel said. “He’s made the most of every passing opportunity. We’ve created a lot of X plays, and to create X plays it’s about 30 percent scheme, it’s about 70 percent of the players making a play, and part of that is the quarterback putting it in a great location for run after catch.
“I think you continue to see that. His ability to extend, use his legs to gain first downs, critical first downs. His ability to score when we’ve asked him to score and run it in. He’s been everything that we’ve asked and he continues to get better. He’s not satisfied. I know that our success of where we are right now, today, has a lot to do with Drake Maye.”
For Vrabel, “X plays,” meaning explosives, are a vital piece to any team’s winning formula. The Patriots, according to Sumer Sports, were the best in the NFL this year at generating those game-changing gains (defined as pass plays of 15 yards or more and runs of 10 yards or more).
They rank first in explosive play rate (16.6 percent) with 165 explosives, and they’re first in explosive pass rate (22.1 percent).
Maye’s accuracy, which Vrabel highlighted, is a trait that MVP voters can try to quantify. Maye led the NFL in completion percentage (72 percent) this season, and he did so while throwing deep down the field, averaging a league-high 9.12 air yards per attempt (among quarterbacks with at least 250 attempts).
According to NextGen Stats, Maye’s completion percentage over expected — which tracks the likelihood that a quarterback’s attempts would be completed based on receiver separation from the nearest defender, where the receiver is on the field, the separation the passer had at time of throw from the nearest pass rusher, and more — ranked first in the league at 9.1 percent, which nearly doubled the second-place quarterback in that category (Brock Purdy, 5.1).
Vrabel didn’t note anything about his team’s schedule while making his case for Maye as the MVP of the league, and based on some interesting research from ESPN’s Bill Barnwell, he was right not to. Both Maye and Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford faced similarly-challenging schedules this season when it came to the pass defenses they saw.