SEATTLE — In the final four minutes of the 2026 NFL season’s opening game, Drake Maye had already scrambled to his right to convert on fourth down.
He’d already found veteran receiver Mack Hollins 11 yards underneath for another fourth down.
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And Maye had kept the series alive on third-and-1 with still another fake handoff and wheel around his left to pick up 6 yards.
So when the New England Patriots faced third-and-5 from the Seattle Seahawks’ 16-yard line with 26 seconds to play, down 3, Maye knew logically that all he needed to do was not turn the ball over. He knew logically that he should try to move the chains but try even harder to maintain the possession and chance to send the game to overtime with a chip-shot field goal. Instead the playmaker in him, that superhero tendency quarterbacks so often have to fight, threatened to overtake logic.
Veteran edge rusher DeMarcus Lawrence swarmed as Maye began to backtrack from the pocket, and Maye saw Hollins — that same Hollins who had cashed in on fourth-and-9 minutes earlier — so he risked a prayer to the end zone.
With pressure in Maye’s face, and an off-platform throw sapping some of his normal strength, the ball began its downward arc short of Hollins.
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For the third time on Wednesday night, a Seahawks defender rather than a Patriots teammate proved in better position to make the catch.
Seahawks cornerback Josh Jobe jumped the route and tapped each of his feet in the end zone as Hollins leapt behind him.
Game over.
“It was something where we had a certain protection on it and were cutting and was trying to get rid of it and realized Mack was in the back there in the back and didn’t put enough on it to get it out,” Maye said after the Patriots’ 13-10 loss. “It was just unacceptable. We had a chance to send it to overtime at the worst and the only thing you [can’t] do is turn the ball over.
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“I just stopped being patient.”
An erosion of the Patriots’ second-half patience allowed Seattle to score 13 unanswered points after New England had built a slow but steady 10-0 lead. A drastic momentum swing in the third quarter carried the Seahawks from a team struggling to play complementary football after a hip injury limited quarterback Sam Darnold to one series … to a firing-on-all-cylinders team sandwiching a YAC-heavy touchdown between two takeaways.
Maye was hardly responsible for all of the swing: His stat line won’t fully capture his receivers’ drops, the pressure his offensive line began to allow, nor the 41 yards after the catch his defensive teammates ceded to Seahawks receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba on the touchdown between Maye’s initial two interception drives.
But Maye’s job as quarterback isn’t to blame the loss of A.J. Brown (ankle) nor the dip in his protection as the game progressed. Maye’s job isn’t to publicly question whether offseason acquisition Romeo Doubs executed assignments as his quarterback intended nor whether Hollins should have batted away that last pass to ensure that if Hollins didn’t catch it, nobody did.
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So Maye stood at the postgame podium after falling four points short of a road upset and blamed himself for the second-half unraveling.
“I thought we had the game under control,” the Patriots’ third-year quarterback said. “I thought we had a good plan to try to start chipping away and be patient and, yeah, lost patience and it cost us.
“[I] realize it’s a long season. But at the same time, you can’t have those and it’s unacceptable.”
Patriots teammates defended their quarterback.
“If you haven’t made a mistake in a football game, you either haven’t played enough games or you’re playing a video game,” Hollins said. “He’s a hell of a player. He’s going to make more plays.”
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