What a week.
Here at The Sweep, I broke news on and analyzed the season’s first two trades: J.J. McCarthy to the Giants and Joey Porter Jr. to the Cowboys.
Now I’m back with my weekly NFL Insider Notebook, where we’ll unpack:
Drake Maye’s early struggles
Micah Parsons’s timeline
Baker Mayfield’s push to return
The Bears’ QB carousel
Kirk Cousins’s Vegas renaissance, and more
One quick programming note: We’ll have our first mailbag this coming week. Paid subscribers will get an email to submit questions soon, and I’ll answer as many as I can—one more way for Sweep stakeholders to have direct access to me.
As always, this dispatch is based on conversations with sources in and around the NFL.
Maye Daze
With all the questions swirling about the cause of Drake Maye’s disappointing start, let’s kick things off by crossing a few possibilities off the list:
It’s not his throwing shoulder: Yes, Maye was added to the injury report this week with the same body part that he injured in the AFC championship game in January, an injury that likely contributed to his poor Super Bowl performance. But this is a new injury, if you can even call it that; Maye landed on the shoulder in last week’s loss to Jacksonville and has received treatment on it, requiring him to be listed on the injury report even though he took every practice rep this week. Maye ripped throws all of training camp, showing no residual effects of the prior injury. Everyone has bumps and bruises during the season. But physically, Maye is fine.
It’s not his relationship with Mike Vrabel: There were some chuckles among those in the know this week about a Boston radio report suggesting a rift between Maye and Vrabel, who told reporters when asked about it, “I’m here because Drake was the quarterback.” While Vrabel has been publicly (and understandably) frustrated with Maye’s turnovers—a league-high seven through three games, including three in last week’s loss to Jacksonville—those who know both the coach and quarterback well say there’s zero truth to the theory that there are problems with their relationship. They speak regularly, never a tense word between them, and together were two of the driving forces behind last year’s AFC title.
It’s not the Kayshon Boutte trade: Vrabel himself said Boutte wouldn’t have been active on game days, making the trade that sent him to Houston a fairly standard pre-cutdown move, aside from the affinity that Patriots fans had developed for Boutte. The reality is Boutte had all of 33 catches last season for New England (42 total, if we’re including the playoffs) and has six for 79 yards so far for the Texans. Everyone involved was ready to move on, and the idea that the Patriots’ sixth receiver would’ve made everything better is myopic.
It’s not Josh McDaniels’s system: While every play call gets dissected when things go wrong, let’s not forget that McDaniels and his offense helped turn Maye into an NFL MVP finalist in their first season together. There’s only so much a coordinator can do when the ball isn’t going where it’s supposed to or the passes are off-target. That doesn’t mean McDaniels wouldn’t like to take some calls back. Nobody is blameless when things aren’t working. But nobody was ripping this same system when the Patriots were scoring 28.8 points per game in the 2025 regular season.
So, what actually is the problem with Maye? And how does he fix it? For starters … he probably needs to stop trying so hard to fix it. And it’s not Maye’s fault alone that the Patriots are tied with the winless Dolphins for last place in scoring, at just 12 points per game.
Opposing coaches and scouts who have watched and/or faced the Patriots say the entire offense looks choppy and disconnected. They’re just not on the same page. In turn, Maye appears to be pressing harder to make something happen, which only leads to more questionable decision-making. For instance, on third-and-goal late in the first half last week in Jacksonville, McDaniels called a basic roll pass. Maye could’ve extended the play to give Rhamondre Stevenson a chance to outrun the peeling linebacker, or Maye could’ve run it himself, or he could’ve simply thrown it away to take the field goal. Instead, Maye flipped the ball across his body in the direction of reserve receiver Efton Chism, who wasn’t even supposed to be a receiving option on the play and had Travis Hunter draped on him. Hunter made the easy interception.
Losing top receiver A.J. Brown in the third quarter of the opener at Seattle certainly hurt. He had three catches for 26 yards and also drew a 34-yard defensive pass interference call that set up a TD in the first half; all three of Maye’s interceptions in that game came after Brown’s injury. The Patriots offense was designed in part to exploit the mismatches Brown can create on the perimeter. And there’s not another A.J. Brown on the roster. While the Patriots’ other receivers have been getting open at a decent clip, there have been a lot of missed opportunities, from Romeo Doubs’s critical drop in Seattle to a near miss off Mack Hollins’s fingertips on a would-be touchdown in Jacksonville.
One way to take pressure off the passing game is to run the football, and the Patriots haven’t done that very effectively either (3.9 yards per carry). The offensive line has been a mess because of injuries, including to the normally durable likes of Mike Onwenu (broken ankle) and his replacement, Greg Van Roten (thigh). And there have been some flat-out freaky miscues, such as a ball that apparently was covered in center Jared Wilson’s blood slipping out of Maye’s hand as he reared back to throw last week.
None of this takes Maye off the hook. He needs to play with more urgency, not panic. He has to stay true to his reads. Frankly, he has to get his confidence back after a shaky stretch that dates back to last season’s playoffs. And it won’t be easy this week in Buffalo against Josh Allen and the Bills, who can score points in bunches and put pressure on the opponent to keep up.
The good news: Even with all their issues, the Patriots have shown they can move the ball when they don’t turn it over. They had five explosive passing plays of 20-plus yards last week and just missed on a couple more, and seven of their 10 drives crossed the 50. Brown is eligible to return in Week 6 and is pushing hard to be back ASAP. And Maye is still learning and growing. He just turned 24 in August.
Find a way to upset the Bills on Sunday, and for all the hysteria, the Patriots would be within one game of the AFC East lead.