With a resurgent Drake Maye, UNC shows what could be possible in dominating Minnesota
This was the Drake Maye everyone expected to see from the beginning this season, the one everyone pretty much did see from the beginning during North Carolina’s first 10 games a season ago, when in the span of a couple months he went from his first college start to Heisman Trophy contention, and made that ascent appear easy and normal.
The Maye we saw Saturday during the Tar Heels’ 31-13 victory against Minnesota was the Maye of the magazine covers. The Maye of an entire offseason’s worth of anticipation and hype. The Maye who, maybe more than anyone, is most responsible for UNC arriving at this moment of rare hope, with the prospect of realizing its unfulfilled potential seldom more promising than now.
It took a little while. Maye was not bad, by any stretch, during UNC’s victories against South Carolina and Appalachian State — the first of those an emphatic statement and the second a story of survival. Yet the stories on those two Saturdays, for UNC, belonged elsewhere. To the defense, against the Gamecocks. To a punishing running game, and some grit, against the Mountaineers.
And then came this latest Saturday at Kenan Stadium, and one of those perfect warm mid-September afternoons under a clear Carolina blue sky. And, with it, the most predictable of performances, an only-a-matter-of-time breakout for Maye and a UNC passing game that’d been good enough through two weeks — fine, solid, not bad — but nothing like it was Saturday.
After this victory against Minnesota, and with a 3-0 record heading into the ACC opener next week at Pittsburgh, it’s all there for the taking for UNC. Clemson has already lost once. Florida State looked vulnerable at Boston College on Saturday. Duke maybe has been the best, most consistent team in the ACC in the very early going, and the Tar Heels play the Blue Devils at home in November.
The result here on Saturday, and a fairly easy victory against a tough non-conference opponent, offered a reminder of UNC’s potential — which, yes, often needs no prompts. This is a program that for decades has been driven by that potential, and haunted by its lack of fulfillment. Even with double-overtime victory against App State last week, UNC’s first three games have provided an intriguing glimpse of what’s possible.
And if the Tar Heels move the ball through the air like they did here on Saturday? And defend that way, too?
Well, what’s not possible, if only UNC can perform to its capability?
Vintage Drake Maye
One could almost pity the large contingent of Golden Gophers supporters Saturday who made the trip to Chapel Hill, only to be treated to an enviable late summer North Carolina day and the emergence, at last, of the quarterback who made all of those preseason Heisman lists. Any Minnesota hope that Maye’s relatively quiet start might continue dimmed considerably less than four minutes in, at the sight of Maye’s 46-yard touchdown pass to Nate McCollum.
It was the kind of throw Maye made so often a year ago, but far less so through UNC’s first two games this season. And it was, indeed, a kind of harbinger of what was to come, what with Maye completing passes later for 55 yards and 39 yards and 38, and five other passes of at least 17 yards.
Minnesota was expected to come into Kenan and provide the Tar Heels a test of physical might and want-to and will. This was a Big Ten team, after all, with Big Ten size at the line of scrimmage; a team with a bunch of very large and strong young men on the offensive line, especially, and size to spare up front on defense, too. And UNC did try, for a while, to establish the sort of running game that worked with such success a week earlier against App State.
But then Mack Brown, the Tar Heels head coach, spoke in plain terms at halftime. He told his assistant coaches he didn’t care if they attempted another run for the remainder of the game.
“Let’s don’t be stubborn,” Brown said, of forcing the run. “... I said, ‘Let’s go. Let’s let Drake, be Drake. And we were able to do that.”
Drake being Drake
Letting Drake be Drake on this particular day translated into Maye completing 29 of his 40 attempts for 414 yards, two touchdowns and two interceptions he lamented, in his typical self-deprecating manner. Those mistakes, which both came in the second quarter on throws Maye wished he could take back, will undoubtedly provide a certain kind of fuel.
“He’s really hard on himself,” Brown said. “And he’ll be hard on himself tomorrow,” because of those interceptions. And yet Brown said, too, that “I’ve never seen him any better” than Maye was on Saturday, and the numbers back him up. Only once, last season at Wake Forest, had Maye thrown for more yards than he did against Minnesota.
It was not a coincidence that the coming-out party for the Tar Heels’ passing offense, as anticipated as it was, came with McCollum, ailing through the first two weeks, back and healthy. Along with Maye, McCollum put on a show of his own, with 15 catches for 165 yards, and it’s not difficult to envision what Brown and everyone else thought UNC’s receiving corps would look like, with Tez Walker lining up opposite McCollum.
That would be a formidable receiving duo, indeed — probably UNC’s most potent since at least 2016, if not before. And yet Walker continues to be stuck in NCAA eligibility jail, with rumblings of a potential legal fight to come in effort to preserve some of his season. In the meantime, the Tar Heels proved on Saturday that they still had some of that finesse and big-play ability in them, which is something they’d not proven, at least in the passing game, through the first two weeks.
They won, too, with yet another contrast in style. And in addition to all those yards he amassed, Maye proved he could punt a little, too. His quick kick near midfield in the first quarter traveled a serviceable 36 yards.
“It came off a little weird,” he said. “I’ve been working with the punters a little bit. You know, my dad was an all state punter in high school. He always said he’s disappointed none of us could punt — none of the Maye brothers can. So I tried my best. It was all right.”
Always chasing more
He provided the same sort of humble self-reflection on his overall day, despite the fact he’d not had a day like this in a good while. After that flourish at Wake Forest last November, defenses began to adjust. Maye’s output, the stuff of video games for much of last year, began to decline. UNC lost four consecutive games to close the 2022 season, and its passing offense remained modest against South Carolina and App State.
But not Saturday. Saturday was what a lot of people had been waiting to see.
“We’ve got a lot going offensively for us,” Maye said. “And we still haven’t played our best. We’re hitting our stride on some drives, but ...”
And then he started talking about his interceptions. For UNC, the story on Saturday was the resurgence of its passing game and its ability to finish. At one point in the fourth quarter, Brown found himself walking over to the defense on the sideline to deliver some words of encouragement, only to find that linebacker Cedric Gray and a couple of others were already speaking out. Then Brown found himself wanting to do the same thing with the offense, only to see Maye in charge.
This, Brown said, is “an older team that’s been there, done that. And they get it.”
On Saturday, it was a team that won in a different way for the third time in three weeks. The most expected of ways, given the everything that followed Maye from the end of the last season into this one. But the way, for a variety of reasons, that’s turned out to be more challenging than anyone thought it’d be. As is usually the case, Maye didn’t seem all that impressed. All those long completions and yards, and he thought most about the two throws he didn’t make.
This story was originally published September 17, 2023 at 6:15 AM with the headline "With a resurgent Drake Maye, UNC shows what could be possible in dominating Minnesota."
