Next up in the “Room to Improve” series for 2024 draft prospects is another player in strong contention for a top-5 overall pick: North Carolina Tar Heels quarterback Drake Maye.
Only entering his third season of college ball and his second as a starter for UNC, Maye has already flashed a considerable amount of physical talent. But as with every prospect, there are areas he can improve during the 2023 college season to help boost his 2024 NFL draft stock.
I went back and watched several UNC games from 2022, including matchups with Notre Dame, North Carolina State, Duke, Wake Forest, Appalachian State and Clemson. Here are some facets of quarterbacking where Maye can improve in my eyes.
Precision sideline throws
Maye is generally a pretty accurate passer. He’s capable of hitting timing throws and delivering anticipatory routes, showing he can fire strikes under pressure too. But when he has to paint the sidelines, Maye can struggle with the ball placement.
In his excellent breakdown on the QB School YouTube channel, former NFL quarterback J.T. O’Sullivan spotlights one specific instance of this issue for Maye.
In short, Maye doesn’t give his receiver enough room to make a play inbounds. In the more extended breakdown, O’Sullivan notes it’s also on the receiver to give him more room, but a better throw here should be six points.
This isn’t the only instance of Maye not having tremendous command of balls thrown tight to the sideline. There are two misses in the Notre Dame game where the receiver can’t quite stay inbounds to make the play where a more accurate throw to the inside would suffice.
This is a double-edged sword, however. Maye doesn’t put the ball in harm’s way by missing wide on the sideline very often. For offenses that stress turnover avoidance more than playmaking, this won’t be nearly as much of a negative for Maye.
Speed and consistency of progressions
It needs to be said from the top here: this is more an issue of inexperience than criticism of Maye. He’s thrown just 527 passes in college, nearly all of them in his breakout 2022 campaign.
The inexperience shows in his swiftness of scanning the field and making his progressions. Maye tends to stay with the initial read too long, and when he does this his default No. 2 option is to tuck and run. There are also times when he will bail on the first read and then struggle to find his second one, especially under pressure.
This is not uncommon at all, especially for such a precocious passer. I lobbed the same criticism at Bryce Young after his 2021 season at Alabama. Young got better at this with more experience and maturity in 2022. The hope is the same will happen for Maye.
Consistency of mechanics
Maye is capable of utilizing multiple throwing platforms. He’s got the arm strength and core body control to not always need to have a clean place to step or time to make the standard delivery.
Where he needs to clean things up is using a more consistent, balanced delivery when he can. There are instances in every game where Maye abandons a traditional throwing platform or motion and instead uses unbalanced feet, poor mechanics or awkward motion to get the ball out when he doesn’t need to improvise.
Here’s an example from the Duke game where Maye unnecessarily uses unorthodox mechanics to deliver a red zone pass to WR Josh Downs. It’s a completion, but Maye doesn’t need to make this delivery as complicated or funky as he does here.
His Tar Heels line was not great in protection, and that can cause bad habits. I went through a lot of this covering a younger Matthew Stafford in his early Lions days. Carson Wentz is a good, more recent example of this sort of flippant mechanics that can cause unnecessary accuracy issues. Stafford learned to get past this, by and large. Wentz has not.
Just because he can make these sorts of throws doesn’t mean they’re the best choice for Maye.
