BALTIMORE — Hopefully the rest of the NFL enjoyed the respite.
The New England Patriots are back in the playoffs — with an unflappable quarterback taking and a coach whose thirst for success leads him to shift his attention to the next goal as soon as one is accomplished.
Sound familiar?
Drake Maye guided the Patriots to a pair of fourth-quarter touchdowns, rallying his team from an 11-point deficit to a 28-24 victory over the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday night at M&T Bank Stadium. It clinched a postseason spot for the Patriots in their first season under head coach Mike Vrabel — who won three Super Bowl titles as a New England linebacker — and dealt a devastating blow to the Ravens’ playoff hopes.
“We’re going to try to win the division. We’re going to focus on that,” Vrabel said as the Patriots improved to 12-3 and remained a game ahead of the second-place Buffalo Bills in the AFC East standings.
New England bounced back from last weekend’s 35-31 home loss to the Bills, who secured a split of the regular-season series after the Patriots won 23-20 at Buffalo in early October.
“I’m excited,” said Vrabel, who spent 2024 as a consultant for the Cleveland Browns after spending the six seasons before that as head coach of the Tennessee Titans. “All the credit to the players. When we win, it’s because of them.”
Seven years after quarterback Tom Brady and coach Bill Belichick won their sixth and final Super Bowl together as New England comrades — and four years after Belichick reached the playoffs with Mac Jones at quarterback — the Patriots return to the postseason in Maye’s second year behind center.
Once the postseason arrives, the first goal for New England will be winning a playoff game for the first time since Super Bowl LIII to cap that 2018 season. Brady’s final pass as a Patriot was an interception that was returned for a touchdown in a 20-13 loss to Vrabel’s Titans in the wild-card round the following season, and New England was blown out by Buffalo in the 2021 season’s wild-card round.
Maye certainly didn’t hurt his NFL MVP case Sunday, throwing for a career-best 380 yards and two touchdowns.
Down 24-13, Maye connected on a 37-yard scoring strike to Kyle Williams, and a 2-point conversion pass to Rhamondre Stevenson made it a three-point game with 9:01 to play.
After their defense forced a punt, the Patriots drove 89 yards for the winning touchdown. Baltimore’s pass rush, which was nonexistent earlier in the game, was much better toward the end, but it didn’t stop Maye & Co.
In the loss to the Bills, the Patriots failed to pick up a first down on their final two possessions, the last one ending inside the two-minute mark and with consecutive incomplete passes by Maye after he was sacked on second down deep in New England territory.
“It was kind of a wake-up call last week: We got a chance to win the game with a game-winning drive, and this week it was like, ‘Man, let’s not have that feeling two weeks in a row,'” Maye said. “It was kind of the elephant in the room.”
Maye was 12-of-14 passing for 139 yards in the final quarter against the Ravens, although the winning touchdown came on one of New England’s few productive running plays, a 21-yard dash by Stevenson with 2:07 left.
The Ravens, who lost two-time NFL MVP quarterback Lamar Jackson to a back injury in the second quarter, turned the ball over on their final drive on a fumble by Zay Flowers.
Baltimore (7-8) is two games behind the AFC North-leading Pittsburgh Steelers with two weeks remaining in the regular season. To win the division, the Ravens would need to win on the road against the NFC North’s Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh and have the Steelers lose to lowly Cleveland next week.
“Tough loss,” Ravens coach John Harbaugh said. “We didn’t do the winning things we need to do. We made some mistakes that cost us.”
The Steelers beat the Detroit Lions earlier in the day, a result that clinched a playoff spot for the NFC North’s first-place Chicago Bears. The dramatic ending of that game came after many fans had already entered the stadium in Baltimore, and Steelers-Lions was shown on the big screen.
Pittsburgh’s win put immense pressure on the Ravens, and things went from bad to worse when New England took a 10-7 lead and then Jackson left late in the second quarter with yet another injury.
Tyler Huntley — who led Baltimore to a huge win in the eighth week over Chicago when Jackson was out with a hamstring injury — helped the Ravens rally. Flowers scored on an 18-yard end-around run to give the Ravens a 17-13 lead in the third quarter. Baltimore then snuffed out a fake punt near midfield and went ahead by 11 on Derrick Henry’s 2-yard run with 12:50 left in the fourth.
However, that was the last time Henry touched the ball, part of another baffling set of decisions in another fourth-quarter collapse by a franchise that has endured plenty of those in recent years.