Gillette Stadium (Foxborough, Mass.) \u2014 Having just clinched a trip to the Super Bowl, Drake Maye waited for his turn to step up to the stage at Empower Field at Mile High in Denver. The New England Patriots quarterback finished off the Broncos in the AFC Championship Game in a white-out blizzard \u2014 and the snow kept coming. Waiting for his cue to speak to the crowd and the TV audience, Maye seemed restless and, frankly, unwilling to go up on stage. You can see as much in the team\u2019s mic\u2019d-up video. “Get the O-line up here, man,” Maye said. “I don\u2019t want to be up here if nobody else is up here.” Ask Maye about his success throwing the deep ball and he\u2019ll credit his offensive line for giving him the time to throw. Ask Maye about the way the Patriots won the game \u2014 just about any game \u2014 and he\u2019ll bring up his offensive line. Ask Maye who his best friends are on the team and he\u2019ll probably list a few offensive linemen. “When your peers notice the hard work that we put in every day \u2014 and obviously we don’t get acknowledged as much as most positions \u2014 it’s always a humbling experience,” tackle Morgan Moses told me in the Patriots’ locker room after practice last week. “It’s the type of guy our quarterback is. He’s never looking for the praise. He’s always looking to put it on somebody else. “And that’s a form of a great leader, knowing that he didn’t get here by himself.” Every quarterback is indebted to his offensive line. When the line plays well, the QB gets the credit. Maye is one of the top two candidates for the NFL MVP award this season, while there aren’t many people who know Moses’ name. But when the offensive line doesn\u2019t play well, the linemen get endless criticism \u2014 as we saw last year in New England. So that moment before Maye went on stage \u2014 and looked to defer the credit \u2014 felt significant. “That’s who he is,” center Garrett Bradbury told me at practice. “I think the guys that know him know that no matter what his role is, no matter how popular he’s gonna get, the individual accolades he deserves \u2014 he doesn’t play for any of that stuff. He just wants to be one of the guys. He wants to win together as a team. \u2026 He doesn\u2019t want the spotlight, which is cool, especially for that position.” Sometimes, a quarterback\u2019s relationship with his offensive line can feel inauthentic. There\u2019s the expectation, for example, that every starting QB will buy expensive Christmas presents for his linemen. In Maye\u2019s case, he bought saunas for his line. “As offensive linemen, we live in that sauna,” Patriots guard Jared Wilson told me. But Maye has gone above and beyond what quarterbacks normally do for the line. Take, for example, last spring when the veteran Bradbury moved in with the second-year QB. Bradbury had just been released by the Minnesota Vikings after six seasons, and his family had relocated to Charlotte temporarily. His wife was due in June with their second daughter. And as Bradbury noted, “It’s not cheap to live up here.” So, rather than find a short-term lease or buy a home, the 30-year-old Bradbury crashed with the 23-year-old Maye. They were familiar with one another because Bradbury\u2019s brother-in-law played baseball with Maye\u2019s brother, Cole, at Florida. But they truly got to know each other in the spring, when they spent most of their time watching basketball. “It felt like going back to college \u2014 having a roommate,” Bradbury said. “He was a great roommate. He can sleep on command, which is pretty impressive. He’d come home from a long day [of OTAs or minicamp] and just pass out on the couch.” (For what it’s worth, Mike Vrabel opened his home to fellow teammates when he played for the Patriots and to fellow coaches more recently. It’s one of the many ways Vrabel and Maye are alike.) There are small gestures, too, which Maye probably doesn\u2019t even realize he\u2019s doing. But after the Patriots beat the Chargers in the wild-card round, Maye hung out at his locker chatting with teammates, reporters and, perhaps most importantly, Moses\u2019 three sons. They told the QB that they have his rookie card, and it seemed pretty clear that it’s one of their prized possessions. If you want a sense of how important fatherhood is to Moses, just look at what he did immediately after winning the AFC Championship Game \u2014\u00a0he called his three boys. So it was special to see Maye spending some time with an offensive lineman’s kids in the locker room. “I talk about my boys all the time, so a lot of the guys in here know what my boys mean to me,” Moses told me in the locker room. “We spend a lot of time away from our families to be able to play this game. Guys noticed that, and when you have somebody like Drake and [lineman] Will [Campbell] that take the time out to make them feel welcome and feel like family, it’s a great outcome.” Maye\u2019s bond with his offensive line is real. It\u2019s a part of the team\u2019s DNA. And it\u2019s really not that big of a deal, in a way, because Maye makes an effort to be tight with everyone on the team, from his receivers to his O-line to his defense. But when it comes to the guys who have changed Maye\u2019s career trajectory, his line ranks high on the list. “I definitely say culturally, for sure, there’s been some change,” veteran tackle Vederian Lowe said when asked about the difference this season in New England. “They brought in some great new guys. \u2026 I think that the combination of all those things \u2014 along with Coach Vrabel establishing an identity for us to abide by every single day. That really helped turn around our unit.” The line has had its ups and downs, including the biggest name, first-round left tackle Campbell, who during the playoffs allowed five pressures against the Chargers and four more against the Texans (including two sacks). But he followed that performance with a zero-sack, two-pressure outing on Maye\u2019s 29 dropbacks in the AFC title game. For all the times Maye has gone out of his way to take care of his line, it was Campbell who went over to the QB before New England’s game-winning drive against the Broncos. “I hope you know how much I love you,”\u00a0Campbell said to Maye on the field. That seems to be what matters most to Maye. Not the spotlight. Not the attention. Not the awards. It’s the relationships he’s built \u2014 and the desire to deliver a Super Bowl to his guys. And moments after Campbell spoke to Maye, the QB did just that. He ran for a first down to end the AFC Championship Game and give his guys a shot at the Lombardi Trophy. In Game Changers, we offer the playbook on the characters you need to know, on the field and off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gillette Stadium (Foxborough, Mass.) \u2014 Having just clinched a trip to the Super Bowl, Drake Maye waited for his turn to step up to the stage at Empower Field at Mile High in Denver. The New England Patriots quarterback finished off the Broncos in the AFC Championship Game in a white-out blizzard \u2014 and the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/onlinebettingnewyork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32035"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/onlinebettingnewyork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/onlinebettingnewyork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onlinebettingnewyork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/onlinebettingnewyork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32035\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/onlinebettingnewyork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onlinebettingnewyork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onlinebettingnewyork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}