University of North Carolina Athletics
Drake Maye
Photo by: Derrick Tuskan/UNC Athletics
Mayed For This
September 1, 2023 | Football
Part of a legendary Carolina family, Drake Maye enters 2023 with a chance to be an all-time great Tar Heel.
This story appeared originally in the latest issue of Born & Bred – the magazine shared exclusively as a benefit of membership in The Rams Club. To join The Rams Club and support Carolina student-athletes, click here.
Back in the day the elite quarterbacks all flocked to the Gus Purcell Quarterback Camp, a week-long confab of a hundred or so high school quarterbacks held on a modest campus in south Charlotte. Purcell was the longtime head coach at Myers Park High in Charlotte who was airing the ball out when most everyone was churning it up from a full-house backfield (he watched the Washington Redskins and Sonny Jurgensen every Sunday afternoon on Channel 3 in Charlotte and drew up their plays). The camp started in 1971, ran three decades and was open to high school players entering the ninth grade and up.
With one exception: Mark Maye.
Maye was so gifted as a rising eighth grader in the nearby Independence High school district that Purcell made an exception and invited him to attend during the summer of 1978, and over five Junes Maye would sling it around to the amazement of the college coaches who worked the camp and the kids attending.
"One night another kid and I snuck out of the dorm and went to watch Mark pitch an American Legion baseball game," remembers Daren Lucas, a quarterback from Clinton who later played defensive back at Carolina and then worked in the athletic department running the ticket office. "There were 20 pro scouts behind home plate with their guns. Mark would throw 500 balls during the day at camp, then go pitch and throw it mid-90s. He was throwing absolute gas. We looked at each other like, 'What in the hell are we watching?'"
Lucas, future Clemson quarterback Rodney Williams and the other quarterbacks in Maye's age group drew straws each evening, the loser getting paired the next day with Maye.
"I've never seen a guy throw a ball harder than Mark Maye," Lucas says. "Period. End of story. I've been lucky to be on the sidelines at NFL games. I've watched Brett Favre warm up, I've seen John Elway warm up. They had nothing on Mark. At camp, no one wanted to buddy-up with Mark because you had to catch it. Your hands hurt so bad after a day of catching Mark. He'd just kill you."
Deems May was four years younger than Maye and attended the Purcell camp from his home in Lexington in the summer of 1982, when Maye was a rising senior and the target of every college in the eastern United States and beyond. Florida State coach Bobby Bowden predicted Maye would win two Heisman Trophies while in college. Maye, of course, would opt for Coach Dick Crum and the Tar Heels and be on the Carolina roster from 1983-87, and May chose the Tar Heels as well, entering Chapel Hill during Maye's senior year, first as a quarterback and later moving to tight end and then playing eight years in the NFL.
"I remember gawking at Mark as a ninth grader in camp," says May. "We all marveled at him. He was a legend in his backyard. Every good quarterback from Washington to Atlanta was at Gus Purcell's. He was the best of them all. My freshman year at Carolina, I just tried to mirror everything he did. In the meeting room, I never remember him not knowing the answer to a question.
"I hated pre-game warmups because he threw the ball so freaking hard. He hurt your hands he had so much gas on it."
Legendary are the stories around the 1983 Tar Heel season, when Maye was being red-shirted as a freshman and the receivers on out-routes had to adjust to the speed with which Maye's ball hit them coming out of their cuts, one All-ACC player razzed by his teammates for the ball hitting his helmet ear hole before he could find it.
"Mark had a velocity no one had ever seen before," Lucas says.
"Mark was good prep for me," May adds. "I sucked at quarterback but was decent at tight end. Catching Mark helped me develop my hands."
Crum and the Tar Heels, known at the time for their pulverizing Power-I ground game that featured thousand-yard rushers in Amos Lawrence, Kelvin Bryant, Tyrone Anthony and Ethan Horton, retooled their offense entering the 1984 season to feature Maye and an offensive plan that included an innovative (for the time) three wide receiver set. But as August training camp opened, the shoulder that Maye had ridden to football and baseball stardom started bothering him (and don't forget the athletic triple-play, a recruiting letter from Dean Smith after his sophomore basketball season).
Rubdowns. Whirlpools. Rest. Stretching. Nothing seemed to help as the season opener loomed. Maye saw limited duty that year and threw 22 passes as Kevin Anthony led the offense and the Tar Heels, who had had five straight bowl seasons, slipped into a two-year slump of .500 ball. Long, long, long story short, Maye flew to Los Angeles in January 1985 for surgery under the arthroscope of noted specialist Dr. Frank Jobe, who said Maye's shoulder looked like that of a 40-year-old man.
"In layman's terms, Maye had almost worn out his shoulder," noted the Tar Heel press guide.
Maye had to rest the arm for a year, then worked his way back into the starting lineup midway through the 1986 season. In his first career start, he hit 25 of 33 passes for 311 yards and three touchdowns against N.C. State. Over a year and a half, the Charlotte wunderkind took Carolina's aerial game to new heights, throwing for a school single-season record of 1,965 yards as a senior.
"If Mark's shoulder doesn't fall apart, the '84 and '85 seasons are completely different animals," Lucas says. "People say Crum was too conservative, wouldn't open it up. That's exactly what he planned to do in '84. When Mark came back, he was good. He was very good. He got plenty of accolades. But he wasn't quite the same. If ever there was a guy you wish hadn't gotten hurt, it was Mark Maye."
Fast forward four decades. Switch scenes from Charlotte to Thibodaux, Louisiana, from the Gus Purcell QB Camp to the Manning Passing Academy.
Started in 1996 at Tulane University by Heisman Trophy winner Archie Manning, the Manning camp has evolved into the premier summer teaching laboratory for quarterbacks, running backs, receivers and tight ends. This year some 1,300 campers descended on the campus of Nicholls State University to learn from the Manning family and its former NFL greats, Peyton and Eli, and more than 40 top college quarterbacks served as counselors.
The Maye family is still front and center.
Only now it's Drake Maye, the fourth of Mark and Aimee Maye's uber athletic sons, who's drawing the juice and carrying on the family tradition of athletic excellence — from Luke's tenure on the Carolina basketball team and his buzzer beater against Kentucky in 2017 — to Cole's slot on the University of Florida baseball team that won the College World Series later that spring — to Beau earning a walk-on spot on the current Tar Heel basketball roster.
An annual tradition at the Manning Academy is a Friday night showcase of the college quarterbacks, dubbed appropriately enough "Friday Night Lights." One of the competitions is the Long Shot Challenge pitting the quarterbacks trying in rapid fire fashion to throw a football through a basketball hoop 50 yards away. First one through the net wins.
This year's contest took less than a minute. On his second throw, Drake Maye wielded the skill that allowed him to complete 66 percent of his passes as a Tar Heel in 2022 and swished the net, sending everyone on to the next station and leaving Maye with a gift certificate from event sponsor, Raising Cane's Chicken.
Mark Maye and the campers at Gus Purcell's got a peanut butter sandwich on a break. Son Drake can capitalize on NIL opportunities and now is eating free chicken tenders.
"The Manning camp reminded me of the old Gus Purcell days," says Deems May, who's worked the Manning camp as a tight ends coach for 18 years. "Mark had this incredibly strong arm and Drake has that but also has uncanny accuracy. I can go down the line of all the kids I've seen at the Manning Academy—Trevor Lawrence, Joe Burrow, Patrick Mahomes, Dak Prescott, Russell Wilson, Matthew Stafford. If you're going on straight accuracy, Drake's right there with them all."
Maye in 2022 had 342 completions with 38 touchdowns and only seven interceptions, and as the year wore on drew accolades from the national pundits and ascended into Heisman Trophy candidacy for that accuracy—threading needles, throwing on the run to the right and to the left, checking down, adroitly lofting balls off his back foot over onrushing defenders, faking left and throwing right, and of course having the athleticism to slip out of trouble and become the team's leading rusher, at times to the horror of his coaches by leaping tall defenders in a single bound. Deems loves a clip of Drake hauling tail to the left against Duke, throwing against his body and nailing Josh Downs for 11 yards on fourth-down, setting up the game-winning score.
"We don't win the game if he doesn't make that play," May says. "He just flicked it effortlessly dead on the money. Throws like that jump out at you when you think of his season."
As did a white-hot degree of competitiveness tempered with a silky goodguy persona who makes eye contact with strangers and easily wields "sir" and "ma'am." He's also mentally bright, with former Tar Heel offensive coordinator Phil Longo marveling over Maye making the right decision on 16 of 17 times Pitt brought pressure in the Tar Heels' 42-24 win last season.
"The older brothers forced him to learn to compete to survive," Tar Heel coach Mack Brown says. "At the same time, he's such a good kid. He has worked very hard to make sure other kids get NIL opportunities instead of him."
His mother remembers Drake, who was five years younger than Luke and four behind Cole, having inordinate swagger in driveway/backyard pickup games in Huntersville.
"He had such confidence, Mark and I had to laugh," Aimee says. "I know his little heart was beating a million miles a minute, but he made it look like it was just another day making plays with the big boys. He won Mr. Basketball playing with the older age group in Bob McKillop's camp at Davidson one year. Drake never seemed to care who was older or younger. It was him against you and it was, 'Game on.'"
Luke was in high school at Hough High in Huntersville around 2012, and he and a teammate were starting to draw early recruiting attention. Drake was about 10 at the time and asked his brother which colleges he'd heard from. Luke mentioned several schools that Drake had never heard of.
"There was a long pause and then Drake said, 'Ya'll need to elevate your game,'" Aimee says.
"Don't let the 'aw, shucks, golly gee' fool you into thinking he's not an extremely confident young man," says Scott Chadwick, the Myers Park head coach during Maye's time there. "I used to call him 'the assassin' because he was just kind of quiet, the kind of guy you wouldn't expect, but you get on the field and he'll light you up."
Now for the encore. The Mayes-to-Carolina story comes full circle in what is widely expected to be Drake's final year and his entry into the 2024 NFL Draft, where every mock speculation has him going in the top three to five selections. Can Maye and the Tar Heels close better than 2022, when they lost four of their last five games? Can Maye learn from new QBs coach and offensive coordinator Chip Lindsey, perhaps tweaking his footwork and his ability to manage pressure, Maye acknowledging that some of the Tar Heels' inordinately high sacks-allowed number of 40 last season came when Maye was "drifting into pressure"? Can the Tar Heel receivers coalesce to replace the departed talents of Downs and Antoine Green and get help from transfers who Maye helped identify and recruit?
From Mark telling Alabama coach Ray Perkins in early 1983 he was going to stay close to home and play for the Tar Heels …
From Mark and Aimee meeting when Mark coached Aimee's Powder Puff football team at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1990 …
From family outings to Chapel Hill in Kenan Stadium and the Smith Center, Drake remembering throwing footballs outside the stadium before games, getting face painted and screaming as Gio Bernard returned a punt against N.C. State in 2012 …
From Luke hitting a shot nearly as gargantuan as Michael Jordan's jumper vs. Georgetown and then getting a standing ovation the next morning at 8 a.m. when he walked into Professor C.J. Skender's Business 101 class …
From Drake originally telling Nick Saban in the summer of 2019 he would play for the Crimson Tide, then being won over by Brown and what Sam Howell was doing as a freshman and taking to heart Brown's admonition that, "This is your state, this is your family's place" …
And from Drake fending off overtures in early 2023 from elite national programs driving Brink's trucks to his doorstep to stay in Chapel Hill and finish what he started.
"There was a lot of talk about where he might go," Mark says. "Aimee and I were proud of the way he handled it. He didn't want to address it. He said, 'I'm where I want to be, where I'm supposed to be.' We're really proud of him for that. He said I'm born and bred, he loves Carolina—the school and the team."
A broad smile breaks across Drake's face as he looks at a photo of him and his brothers at the 2010 Music City Bowl in Nashville. At eight years of age, Drake is clearly the youngest.
"Golly, I remember that game," he says. "T.J. Yates was the quarterback. He was one of my favorite players. Look at this. I was the runt. My brothers are all six feet tall, I'm probably five-three. I look adopted. But that was a great trip, a big win for Carolina."
Indeed, those Carolina blue roots run deep.
"I did not want to leave the locker room, leave the teammates I'd grown up with," Drake says. "I've known a lot of these guys from camp or 7-on-7. I did not want to go to a new locker room and have to start over. I love the campus, I love the university. I love going to school here. Carolina blue means a lot to me. You can't beat Chapel Hill."
Back in the day the elite quarterbacks all flocked to the Gus Purcell Quarterback Camp, a week-long confab of a hundred or so high school quarterbacks held on a modest campus in south Charlotte. Purcell was the longtime head coach at Myers Park High in Charlotte who was airing the ball out when most everyone was churning it up from a full-house backfield (he watched the Washington Redskins and Sonny Jurgensen every Sunday afternoon on Channel 3 in Charlotte and drew up their plays). The camp started in 1971, ran three decades and was open to high school players entering the ninth grade and up.
With one exception: Mark Maye.
Maye was so gifted as a rising eighth grader in the nearby Independence High school district that Purcell made an exception and invited him to attend during the summer of 1978, and over five Junes Maye would sling it around to the amazement of the college coaches who worked the camp and the kids attending.
"One night another kid and I snuck out of the dorm and went to watch Mark pitch an American Legion baseball game," remembers Daren Lucas, a quarterback from Clinton who later played defensive back at Carolina and then worked in the athletic department running the ticket office. "There were 20 pro scouts behind home plate with their guns. Mark would throw 500 balls during the day at camp, then go pitch and throw it mid-90s. He was throwing absolute gas. We looked at each other like, 'What in the hell are we watching?'"
Lucas, future Clemson quarterback Rodney Williams and the other quarterbacks in Maye's age group drew straws each evening, the loser getting paired the next day with Maye.
"I've never seen a guy throw a ball harder than Mark Maye," Lucas says. "Period. End of story. I've been lucky to be on the sidelines at NFL games. I've watched Brett Favre warm up, I've seen John Elway warm up. They had nothing on Mark. At camp, no one wanted to buddy-up with Mark because you had to catch it. Your hands hurt so bad after a day of catching Mark. He'd just kill you."
Deems May was four years younger than Maye and attended the Purcell camp from his home in Lexington in the summer of 1982, when Maye was a rising senior and the target of every college in the eastern United States and beyond. Florida State coach Bobby Bowden predicted Maye would win two Heisman Trophies while in college. Maye, of course, would opt for Coach Dick Crum and the Tar Heels and be on the Carolina roster from 1983-87, and May chose the Tar Heels as well, entering Chapel Hill during Maye's senior year, first as a quarterback and later moving to tight end and then playing eight years in the NFL.
"I remember gawking at Mark as a ninth grader in camp," says May. "We all marveled at him. He was a legend in his backyard. Every good quarterback from Washington to Atlanta was at Gus Purcell's. He was the best of them all. My freshman year at Carolina, I just tried to mirror everything he did. In the meeting room, I never remember him not knowing the answer to a question.
"I hated pre-game warmups because he threw the ball so freaking hard. He hurt your hands he had so much gas on it."
Legendary are the stories around the 1983 Tar Heel season, when Maye was being red-shirted as a freshman and the receivers on out-routes had to adjust to the speed with which Maye's ball hit them coming out of their cuts, one All-ACC player razzed by his teammates for the ball hitting his helmet ear hole before he could find it.
"Mark had a velocity no one had ever seen before," Lucas says.
"Mark was good prep for me," May adds. "I sucked at quarterback but was decent at tight end. Catching Mark helped me develop my hands."
Crum and the Tar Heels, known at the time for their pulverizing Power-I ground game that featured thousand-yard rushers in Amos Lawrence, Kelvin Bryant, Tyrone Anthony and Ethan Horton, retooled their offense entering the 1984 season to feature Maye and an offensive plan that included an innovative (for the time) three wide receiver set. But as August training camp opened, the shoulder that Maye had ridden to football and baseball stardom started bothering him (and don't forget the athletic triple-play, a recruiting letter from Dean Smith after his sophomore basketball season).
Rubdowns. Whirlpools. Rest. Stretching. Nothing seemed to help as the season opener loomed. Maye saw limited duty that year and threw 22 passes as Kevin Anthony led the offense and the Tar Heels, who had had five straight bowl seasons, slipped into a two-year slump of .500 ball. Long, long, long story short, Maye flew to Los Angeles in January 1985 for surgery under the arthroscope of noted specialist Dr. Frank Jobe, who said Maye's shoulder looked like that of a 40-year-old man.
"In layman's terms, Maye had almost worn out his shoulder," noted the Tar Heel press guide.
Maye had to rest the arm for a year, then worked his way back into the starting lineup midway through the 1986 season. In his first career start, he hit 25 of 33 passes for 311 yards and three touchdowns against N.C. State. Over a year and a half, the Charlotte wunderkind took Carolina's aerial game to new heights, throwing for a school single-season record of 1,965 yards as a senior.
"If Mark's shoulder doesn't fall apart, the '84 and '85 seasons are completely different animals," Lucas says. "People say Crum was too conservative, wouldn't open it up. That's exactly what he planned to do in '84. When Mark came back, he was good. He was very good. He got plenty of accolades. But he wasn't quite the same. If ever there was a guy you wish hadn't gotten hurt, it was Mark Maye."
Fast forward four decades. Switch scenes from Charlotte to Thibodaux, Louisiana, from the Gus Purcell QB Camp to the Manning Passing Academy.
Started in 1996 at Tulane University by Heisman Trophy winner Archie Manning, the Manning camp has evolved into the premier summer teaching laboratory for quarterbacks, running backs, receivers and tight ends. This year some 1,300 campers descended on the campus of Nicholls State University to learn from the Manning family and its former NFL greats, Peyton and Eli, and more than 40 top college quarterbacks served as counselors.
The Maye family is still front and center.
Only now it's Drake Maye, the fourth of Mark and Aimee Maye's uber athletic sons, who's drawing the juice and carrying on the family tradition of athletic excellence — from Luke's tenure on the Carolina basketball team and his buzzer beater against Kentucky in 2017 — to Cole's slot on the University of Florida baseball team that won the College World Series later that spring — to Beau earning a walk-on spot on the current Tar Heel basketball roster.
An annual tradition at the Manning Academy is a Friday night showcase of the college quarterbacks, dubbed appropriately enough "Friday Night Lights." One of the competitions is the Long Shot Challenge pitting the quarterbacks trying in rapid fire fashion to throw a football through a basketball hoop 50 yards away. First one through the net wins.
This year's contest took less than a minute. On his second throw, Drake Maye wielded the skill that allowed him to complete 66 percent of his passes as a Tar Heel in 2022 and swished the net, sending everyone on to the next station and leaving Maye with a gift certificate from event sponsor, Raising Cane's Chicken.
Mark Maye and the campers at Gus Purcell's got a peanut butter sandwich on a break. Son Drake can capitalize on NIL opportunities and now is eating free chicken tenders.
"The Manning camp reminded me of the old Gus Purcell days," says Deems May, who's worked the Manning camp as a tight ends coach for 18 years. "Mark had this incredibly strong arm and Drake has that but also has uncanny accuracy. I can go down the line of all the kids I've seen at the Manning Academy—Trevor Lawrence, Joe Burrow, Patrick Mahomes, Dak Prescott, Russell Wilson, Matthew Stafford. If you're going on straight accuracy, Drake's right there with them all."
Maye in 2022 had 342 completions with 38 touchdowns and only seven interceptions, and as the year wore on drew accolades from the national pundits and ascended into Heisman Trophy candidacy for that accuracy—threading needles, throwing on the run to the right and to the left, checking down, adroitly lofting balls off his back foot over onrushing defenders, faking left and throwing right, and of course having the athleticism to slip out of trouble and become the team's leading rusher, at times to the horror of his coaches by leaping tall defenders in a single bound. Deems loves a clip of Drake hauling tail to the left against Duke, throwing against his body and nailing Josh Downs for 11 yards on fourth-down, setting up the game-winning score.
"We don't win the game if he doesn't make that play," May says. "He just flicked it effortlessly dead on the money. Throws like that jump out at you when you think of his season."
As did a white-hot degree of competitiveness tempered with a silky goodguy persona who makes eye contact with strangers and easily wields "sir" and "ma'am." He's also mentally bright, with former Tar Heel offensive coordinator Phil Longo marveling over Maye making the right decision on 16 of 17 times Pitt brought pressure in the Tar Heels' 42-24 win last season.
"The older brothers forced him to learn to compete to survive," Tar Heel coach Mack Brown says. "At the same time, he's such a good kid. He has worked very hard to make sure other kids get NIL opportunities instead of him."
His mother remembers Drake, who was five years younger than Luke and four behind Cole, having inordinate swagger in driveway/backyard pickup games in Huntersville.
"He had such confidence, Mark and I had to laugh," Aimee says. "I know his little heart was beating a million miles a minute, but he made it look like it was just another day making plays with the big boys. He won Mr. Basketball playing with the older age group in Bob McKillop's camp at Davidson one year. Drake never seemed to care who was older or younger. It was him against you and it was, 'Game on.'"
Luke was in high school at Hough High in Huntersville around 2012, and he and a teammate were starting to draw early recruiting attention. Drake was about 10 at the time and asked his brother which colleges he'd heard from. Luke mentioned several schools that Drake had never heard of.
"There was a long pause and then Drake said, 'Ya'll need to elevate your game,'" Aimee says.
"Don't let the 'aw, shucks, golly gee' fool you into thinking he's not an extremely confident young man," says Scott Chadwick, the Myers Park head coach during Maye's time there. "I used to call him 'the assassin' because he was just kind of quiet, the kind of guy you wouldn't expect, but you get on the field and he'll light you up."
Now for the encore. The Mayes-to-Carolina story comes full circle in what is widely expected to be Drake's final year and his entry into the 2024 NFL Draft, where every mock speculation has him going in the top three to five selections. Can Maye and the Tar Heels close better than 2022, when they lost four of their last five games? Can Maye learn from new QBs coach and offensive coordinator Chip Lindsey, perhaps tweaking his footwork and his ability to manage pressure, Maye acknowledging that some of the Tar Heels' inordinately high sacks-allowed number of 40 last season came when Maye was "drifting into pressure"? Can the Tar Heel receivers coalesce to replace the departed talents of Downs and Antoine Green and get help from transfers who Maye helped identify and recruit?
From Mark telling Alabama coach Ray Perkins in early 1983 he was going to stay close to home and play for the Tar Heels …
From Mark and Aimee meeting when Mark coached Aimee's Powder Puff football team at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1990 …
From family outings to Chapel Hill in Kenan Stadium and the Smith Center, Drake remembering throwing footballs outside the stadium before games, getting face painted and screaming as Gio Bernard returned a punt against N.C. State in 2012 …
From Luke hitting a shot nearly as gargantuan as Michael Jordan's jumper vs. Georgetown and then getting a standing ovation the next morning at 8 a.m. when he walked into Professor C.J. Skender's Business 101 class …
From Drake originally telling Nick Saban in the summer of 2019 he would play for the Crimson Tide, then being won over by Brown and what Sam Howell was doing as a freshman and taking to heart Brown's admonition that, "This is your state, this is your family's place" …
And from Drake fending off overtures in early 2023 from elite national programs driving Brink's trucks to his doorstep to stay in Chapel Hill and finish what he started.
"There was a lot of talk about where he might go," Mark says. "Aimee and I were proud of the way he handled it. He didn't want to address it. He said, 'I'm where I want to be, where I'm supposed to be.' We're really proud of him for that. He said I'm born and bred, he loves Carolina—the school and the team."
A broad smile breaks across Drake's face as he looks at a photo of him and his brothers at the 2010 Music City Bowl in Nashville. At eight years of age, Drake is clearly the youngest.
"Golly, I remember that game," he says. "T.J. Yates was the quarterback. He was one of my favorite players. Look at this. I was the runt. My brothers are all six feet tall, I'm probably five-three. I look adopted. But that was a great trip, a big win for Carolina."
Indeed, those Carolina blue roots run deep.
"I did not want to leave the locker room, leave the teammates I'd grown up with," Drake says. "I've known a lot of these guys from camp or 7-on-7. I did not want to go to a new locker room and have to start over. I love the campus, I love the university. I love going to school here. Carolina blue means a lot to me. You can't beat Chapel Hill."
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