Drake Maye's second year in New England was the kind of leap that shows up in every leaderboard, but the mechanism behind it is unusually specific. It wasn't better protection, a new play-caller's short-passing scheme, or a Year-2 completion-percentage nudge. It was almost entirely one depth tier: throws 15-plus yards downfield.

Table of Contents

1. The overall leap
2. What actually changed: the deep ball
3. It wasn't just clean-pocket noise
4. The team-level payoff

1. The overall leap

Maye's dropback EPA/play went from −0.084 on 374 dropbacks in 2024 to +0.175 on 681 dropbacks in 2025, with CPOE climbing from +2.8 to +8.0 over the same span. That +0.175 was the third-best mark among the 15 quarterbacks with 300-plus dropbacks in 2025, behind only Jordan Love (+0.253) and Matthew Stafford (+0.221) and narrowly ahead of Jared Goff (+0.175 on rounding — the leaderboard sorts Maye above him at four decimals) and Dak Prescott (+0.165).

For a No. 3 overall pick with a rough rookie sample, that's the kind of jump that could be written as a generic "he figured it out" story. The play-by-play says it's more specific than that.

2. What actually changed: the deep ball

Splitting Maye's dropbacks by air yards is where the season splits open. On throws with air_yards ≥ 15:

He roughly tripled the volume (52 → 157 downfield attempts), nearly doubled the completion rate, and swung his CPOE by more than 20 points of expected completion percentage on those throws. The EPA/play swing — +0.014 to +0.765 — is enormous. For scale, the best full-season overall QB EPA/play in the entire 2025 sample was Jordan Love at +0.253. Maye is producing more than three times that per play whenever the target is 15-plus yards downfield.

He was also the only quarterback to combine that kind of volume with that kind of efficiency. Among 2025 QBs with 60-plus attempts of 15+ air yards, only Lamar Jackson (+0.892 EPA/play on 79 attempts) and Goff (+0.813 on 97 attempts) posted a higher deep EPA/play than Maye's +0.765 — and Maye's 157 attempts were more than either of them threw. Stafford, the closest analog on both volume and productivity, had 195 attempts at +0.659 EPA/play with a +1.85 CPOE — Maye beat him on efficiency by more than 10 points of expected completion.

That single depth tier is doing most of the work in his overall line. In 2024 the deep-ball damage — a −10.94 CPOE, 28.8% completion, and a break-even 0.014 EPA/play at that range — was dragging his season down. In 2025 it flipped from a drag to the biggest engine of his top-three EPA finish.

3. It wasn't just clean-pocket noise

The obvious counter is that any big EPA jump on downfield throws is a proxy for cleaner protection — deep balls only get thrown from clean pockets, and a better line will inflate the number. That doesn't hold here.

Splitting Maye's dropbacks by whether he took a sack or a QB hit:

The pressure-rate math is nearly identical year to year (about 16% of dropbacks either season), and his pressured-play EPA is essentially flat. What moved is his clean-pocket EPA/play, from +0.118 to +0.416 — a bigger jump, in absolute terms, than the entire clean-pocket average he posted as a rookie. If Maye's clean-pocket play had merely held at 2024 levels while he doubled his dropback count, the 2025 season doesn't look like this. The improvement is his.

4. The team-level payoff

New England's offense was 27th in EPA/play in 2024 at −0.082. In 2025 it finished 5th at +0.090. That's a 22-spot jump for a franchise that spent the last two years being described as one of the lowest-ceiling offenses in football.

The Patriots' 2025 rise wasn't a systemic scheme reinvention or a sudden influx of skill talent. It ran through their second-year quarterback deciding — and being trusted — to push the ball down the field roughly three times as often, and executing it at a top-of-league rate when he did. The published narrative around deep-ball dependence has usually been a team-failure story (Miami's collapse when the shot plays stop hitting, San Francisco's YAC-vs-air-yards tension, Dallas's boom-bust profile). This is the inverted version: a single quarterback's downfield tier as the mechanism of a team-level rise.

The interesting follow-up question, which I don't think this data can answer yet, is stability. Deep-ball CPOE tends to be noisier year to year than short-and-intermediate CPOE, and a +9.66 mark on 157 attempts is well above what any quarterback has sustained for multiple seasons in this sample. If Maye regresses toward, say, a +3 to +5 deep CPOE next year while keeping the volume, his overall EPA/play would still land in the top ten — just not third. If he holds this, the Patriots have something rarer than a good young quarterback; they have the best downfield passer in the league.