There’s no sugarcoating it. Drake Maye’s meteoric 2025 regular season crashed back to earth against four of the NFL’s best defenses in the playoffs, and the young New England Patriots quarterback wasn’t exactly ready to relaunch in last week’s opener at Seattle.
The harsh reality is that the way to defend Maye and the Patriots is now clear. Josh McDaniels and company must find a solution, and if Sunday’s slate of games is any indication, Week 2 against the Pittsburgh Steelers hardly looks like a reprieve.
Most of the conversation on Maye’s recent struggles has centered on his last five games, starting with the wild-card round of the 2025 playoffs. That line actually traces back farther, to the Patriots’ Week 15 home game against Buffalo in 2025.
Former Bills head coach Sean McDermott went zone-heavy against Maye and a Patriots offense that had been tormenting teams downfield. McDermott leaned heavily on Cover 6, essentially taking away Maye’s patented deep balls while making him work for completions in the intermediate areas with post-snap deception.
It worked. The Patriots scored four touchdowns in that Bills game, a 35-31 loss, but none of them came through the air. Maye rushed for two touchdowns, and the Patriots got two more on the ground from TreVeyon Henderson. Maye passed for a regular-season-low 155 yards in that game.
That’s been the rinse-and-repeat game plan against the Patriots ever since. Opponents are playing more zone, taking away the deep ball and daring Maye to beat them underneath or in the running game.
As Maye said after Wednesday’s fourth-quarter implosion against the Seahawks, the young QB's patience remains a work in progress. Meanwhile, New England’s rushing attack remains a major concern.
So while this week’s home opener feels like a get-right spot against a mediocre Steelers team, you'll have to earn it. Per Patriots reporter Evan Lazar, only one team played 100 percent zone on defense in Week 1: Mike McCarthy’s Steelers.
Drake Maye’s struggles against Cover 6 have been well documented
Pittsburgh has always been a do-what-we-do style of team, especially on defense. Under former head coach Mike Tomlin, it was usually no secret how they approached each game. They carried themselves with the confidence that they could run their stuff each week and do it better than their opponent.
That seems to be changing under McCarthy and defensive coordinator Patrick Graham.
Graham was the Las Vegas Raiders in 2025. The Patriots lost their season opener to that bad Raiders team, and it may have been less random than it seemed at the end of the year. Graham stayed in a zone in over 90 percent of his team’s defensive snaps in that game, per Lazar.
Maye and the Patriots routinely shredded teams last year when they blitzed or gave them heavy man-to-man looks. His numbers dipped a bit against zone — but not drastically. Per Next Gen Stats, Maye had a 103.1 passer rating against zone defenses in 2025. He led the NFL in yards per attempt, completion percentage, and passer rating.
Maye BALLED against man last year and pretty dang good against zone. But you also had Diggs who knew how to find those zone honey spots.
— Michael Rodnick (@MJRodnick) September 13, 2026
He had some terrible throws against Seattle but his completion rate was hair under 70%.
Gonna need this week 2. https://t.co/bSMcwj2nuB pic.twitter.com/j6yzRDTDce
It’s the deceptive Cover 6 — a staple of Mike Macdonald and the Seahawks — that has given Maye the most problems and forced him into mistakes.
Here’s how Next Gen Stats research analyst James Reber broke the extremely complex coverage scheme down for NFL.com back in February:
“Cover 6, the favorite of Macdonald and the Seahawks, is a hybrid of Cover 2 and Cover 4. It's often called quarter-quarter-half, with one safety covering the boundary side of the field, the other safety splitting the field side with a cornerback and four players underneath.
While Cover 6 is the least common of the split-safety schemes (with a 9.2% usage rate in 2025), it has been a hallmark of the defenses run by the last four Super Bowl champions.”
Why the Steelers could test Drake Maye’s biggest coverage blind spot in Week 2
The Steelers’ defense isn’t the Seahawks', but Graham comes from the Bill Belichick coaching tree, and pre-snap deception is a major part of his plan. It worked to an extent in Las Vegas, with Maxx Crosby routinely creating organic pressure. The Raiders finished 21st in total EPA per play on defense in 2025.
Graham has more to work with in Pittsburgh with T.J. Watt and Cam Heyward.
The good news is that a 100 percent zone percentage is extremely predictable. The Patriots should know what kind of game they’re getting, and they’ve had 11 days to prepare for this one after playing the opener Wednesday night.
But Maye should expect to see a heavy dose of Cover 6 until he proves he can stay patient and take what the defense gives him. The Steelers played that exact coverage on 22 percent of their defensive snaps during their Week 1 win over the Falcons.
If Maye can get right against this Steelers team, with their style and high-end pass rush, Patriots fans should be able to breathe a little easier as national criticism on their young quarterback continues to mount.
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