With about six minutes left in the first half of the New York Jets’ game against the New England Patriots on Thursday, Jacoby Brissett lunged for a play-action drop that almost immediately turned frantic. The Jets’ rush off the line immediately threw the Patriots’ front five back. Defensive back Michael Carter II was brought in as an extra rusher and was so quick in the backfield that Patriots running back Antonio Gibson had to abandon the idea of faking a handoff and moving toward Carter to prevent the blitzing defensive back from overwhelming Brissett.
It was the third sack of the half, one of five Brissett suffered on the night, during a game that started with an obvious disadvantage for the Patriots (it got so bad that five Patriots defenders failed to stop a two-man Jets pass rush on a Hail Mary attempt before halftime). Even without Jermaine Johnson (Achilles injury) and Haason Reddick (contract dispute), it was clear that the Jets’ large number of talented pass rushers would greatly impact a Patriots offensive line that was plagued by both injuries and bizarre departures to puncture an already talent-poor front. (For good measure, here’s another statistic that describes the Patriots’ offensive ineffectiveness: their four first downs in the first half were the fewest any Patriots team had in a first half since 2000.)
This is nothing new for Brissett. In 2017, he was sacked 10 times while with the Indianapolis Colts in a game against the Jacksonville Jaguars. A few weeks later, he was sacked another eight times in a game against the Tennessee Titans. Still, he has remained a sought-after veteran bridge starter and backup who developed during New England’s heyday before being released and returning this season.
But on a night like Thursday’s 24-3, Brissett was indispensable, because until the final four minutes of garbage time, the one who didn’t take those hits, didn’t make those surefire plays, didn’t try to avert the inevitable doom was rookie Drake Maye, the No. 3 pick in the draft and the quarterback of the future. Down in Carolina, the Panthers have benched Bryce Young after Young’s wiring shorted out over the course of 18 mostly dismal starts. Before Young arrived, Carolina traded its two best offensive players (Christian McCaffrey and DJ Moore) and replaced that firepower with a career-ending Adam Thielen. The mismanagement of the roster was so bad that the club’s general manager (and de facto human shield for notoriously impatient and overly committed owner David Tepper) was fired after last season along with the interim head coach. To be clear, I don’t believe Young’s predicament has anything to do with the current coaching staff, but rather a collection of bad habits developed in his rookie season by a chaotic and uncoordinated coaching staff and a front office that profoundly failed those coaches in providing starting lineup-quality players. Those problems ballooned to new coach Dave Canales’ doorstep in 2024, and he did the best thing for Young by taking the quarterback off the roster.
While New England’s roster isn’t quite as ruined as Carolina’s, the franchise has wisely avoided what has become an absolute trap for teams that were bad enough to earn – or have to trade for – a top-five pick to select a quarterback.
Taking a loss in a game like this used to be a foolish rite of passage for rookies. Coaches like to use the phrase “drinking from a firehose” to describe the amount of information and experience their players must process in a short period of time, without mentioning that this method has drowned countless talented players who have entered the league and left without a proper chance to develop. Games like Thursday’s can have an incredibly damaging effect on a developing player, forcing a rooky to develop nervous habits, opening the door to injuries that rookies are more likely to try to overcome, and putting them at risk of having their confidence destroyed.
The quarterback position is a ridiculous ordeal that seems to creep into the player’s psyche over time. After so many losses and the public accountability for those losses – wake me up if it’s cool to have a quarterback analyze the GM’s draft record – it becomes hard to separate yourself from failure, even if the dividing line is clear to anyone with a brain.
As we move further into an era of common sense, the path to success looks more concrete: Don’t start the quarterback until the roster is at least good enough to at least support him and at best promote him. Or, if you can’t help it, do what New England did on Thursday and give Maye a little taste of what the end of a beating might look like.
Eventually, Young will be a productive starter in the NFL. He will join a group of other highly drafted players like Geno Smith, Baker Mayfield and Sam Darnold who got a reprieve from their own hellscapes.
New England hopes Maye can be good … in New England. And that process will be difficult. The Patriots seemed to be on a treadmill to nowhere on Thursday, and some people might have seen sense in giving Maye a full, official start, getting him acclimated to the game preparation and pace of a professional regular-season game. But that more cautious approach will pay off as Maye begins his career in earnest in a position where he’s less likely to get crushed on every down. To actually play football, which unfortunately wasn’t in the cards for Brissett on Thursday.
