North Carolina’s Drake Maye prepares for another dose of Pitt’s ‘bully ball’
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When he met with reporters Tuesday in Chapel Hill, N.C., Drake Maye said he knows what to expect from Pitt when he leads North Carolina into Acrisure Stadium on Saturday night.
“They try to play that bully ball,” he said. “They have that tough personality of the ACC. They hit you hard and try to do a little extra stuff to get you riled up.”
Aside from being one of the nation’s top quarterbacks — possibly the first choice in the 2024 NFL Draft, according to Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi — Maye has a good memory to match his strong arm.
It was 11 months ago that former Pitt linebacker Tylar Wiltz tried to set a tone for the North Carolina game with this bit of pregame bravado:
“We’re athletic, just like them. We work hard, just like them,” he said. “We’re going to hit (Maye) hard just like we hit (Louisville’s Malik Cunningham) and, if he doesn’t get up, that’s not our problem. We’re going to do what we do as a defense. We’re going full speed. It will click. Hear me out. Watch.”
When he reminded himself of Wiltz’s remarks, Maye shrugged his shoulders.
“They had that mentality, and it all worked out,” he said.
Just as Louisville did the week before, North Carolina won the game 42-24, with Maye, who suffered a cut hand in the game, throwing for 388 yards and five touchdowns to erase a 10-point second-half deficit.
Back on the South Side of Pittsburgh, the Panthers are trying to treat the 2023 ACC opener as just one of eight conference games.
“He does a lot of things really well. He’s a good player,” safety Javon McIntyre said. “We have a lot of good players, too.”
Safeties coach Cory Sanders can’t help but notice the athletic gifts Maye (6-foot-4, 230 pounds) possesses and his ability to make throws to most areas of the field.
“One thing that you notice, that ball jumps out of his hand,” Sanders said. “Sometimes, he’s moving out of the pocket, and he’s throwing back across his body to the middle of the field. He’s a quick processor. At the same time, he can escape and extend plays.”
North Carolina coach Mack Brown said there is a similarity between Maye and 13-year NFL veteran Colt McCoy, whom he coached at Texas two decades ago.
“If Colt McCoy ever threw an incompletion, we all said, ‘What’s wrong with him?’ ” Brown said Monday in his weekly news conference. “It’s that way with Drake. If he throws an incompletion, we say, ‘What’s wrong with him?’ ”
Maye was third-team All-American by Pro Football Focus last season as well as ACC Player of the Year. This season, he has thrown as many touchdown passes (four) as Pitt’s Phil Jurkovec, with one more interception (four). But his completion percentage (72.5%, 74 of 102) is second in the ACC to Miami’s Tyler Van Dyke.
Narduzzi said North Carolina’s spread attack will create a contrast to how Pitt prepared last week for West Virginia.
“We’re going from the triple option to this spread, with the best quarterback in the country, probably, arguably,” he said. “I would be shocked if he’s not the first pick next year regardless of who wins the Heisman Trophy and all that baloney. When they do all their evaluations on character, the kid is an unbelievable young man.
“Drake is a phenomenal quarterback, and I don’t know how we do it, but that’s what we practice for.”
Nonetheless, Narduzzi wonders what might have happened last year if defensive tackle Calijah Kancey hadn’t been ejected for targeting in the second quarter.
“The change happened when we didn’t get a pass rush. Kancey went down,” the coach said. “You don’t forget some of those things. And because Maye can scramble, we lost our faith in doing what we needed to do. Why did we get smoked? It was because we stopped doing the little things right in coverage.”
Brown is pleased that his No. 17 Tar Heels (3-0) are one of only four schools with two victories against Power 5 nonconference opponents (South Carolina and Minnesota). North Carolina has won games against an SEC and Big Ten opponent in the same season for the first time since 1976.
“We should be taking high energy and confidence to Pittsburgh, unlike a lot of people who haven’t played anybody,” Brown said.
Yet the Pitt game will be an even more serious test for North Carolina, and not just because the Panthers won the past two games at Heinz/Acrisure in overtime. Brown said it’s time for the Tar Heels to get accustomed to winning consistently. North Carolina, which hasn’t been 4-0 since 1997, started 9-1 in 2022 before ending the season on a four-game losing streak.
“We haven’t handled success very well. That’s part of the growing of our program,” he said. “I want the response to look like you just got beat, and there are so many things you have to improve on to get better.
“You’re playing to a standard. You can’t get comfortable.”
He said he was tough on his coaches this week as if North Carolina lost to Minnesota, instead of scoring an impressive 31-13 victory.
“We have to get used to winning again. We have to think we’re going to win, plan on winning, instead of feeling too good about ourselves and getting pats on the back and not as ready to play next week.”