For UNC QB Drake Maye, Heisman talk not ‘an elephant in the room,’ but hard to ignore
The camera started on Mark Maye. When his face appeared on the video boards at the Smith Center on Tuesday, there was an appropriately nice round of applause from the basketball crowd for the former North Carolina quarterback and, suddenly, patriarch of Tar Heel legends.
Then the camera panned left to Drake Maye, watching his UNC classmates alongside his father, and the applause turned into a roar. Luke Maye has attended at least one North Carolina basketball game this season, but not Tuesday, denying the world an interesting sociological experiment on which Maye brother is currently atop the pantheon among UNC fans.
At any rate, Drake Maye’s sudden arrival on the screens paralleled in many ways his nascent Heisman Trophy campaign. One second, he wasn’t there and nobody noticed. The next second, he was, and everyone went wild. That’s how it goes when you’re not one of the guys in August, the C.J. Strouds and Bryce Youngs — and Sam Howells, briefly, a year ago — of the world. Maye’s Heisman candidacy has, like so many before him who emerged out of relative nowhere during the season, proceeded gradually and then suddenly, as the old line goes.
“It happened pretty fast,” Maye said earlier this week. “It’s nothing I didn’t expect, not that I expected to be in these conversations. I expected to have a good season and have a chance to win the ACC Coastal.”
Out of relative nowhere is a fair reading of the situation: Tight end Kamari Morales maintained this week that there was no secret favorite in the competition for the quarterback job in training camp, and that it could just as easily be Jacolby Criswell having this success now. The degree to which that is God’s honest truth is a bit hazy, but that’s their story and they’re sticking to it, long after it would have been easy — in the wake of Maye’s success — to abandon.
Either way, nothing against Criswell, but clearly UNC made the right choice.
“I think everybody in the building knew that he was a guy, and the whole world is starting to see it now,” Morales said. “But the sky’s the limit for him. I mean, this is just the beginning.”
Maye is about to step on rarefied ground. Since the Heisman started inviting finalists to New York for the trophy presentation in 1982, only three players from North Carolina have made that trip: Wake Forest’s Bryce Love (Stanford) in 2017, Advance’s Chris Perry (Michigan) in 2003 and Bryson City’s Heath Shuler (Tennessee) in 1993. Love was the closest of them, finishing second behind Baker Mayfield.
Maye also has a chance to post the best finish of any player from one of North Carolina’s schools since UNC legend Choo-Choo Justice finished second in 1948 and 1949. Philip Rivers’ seventh-place finish in 2003 is the best in recent years.
“It’s not kind of an elephant in the room,” Maye said. “We’ve just been rolling along with the season. Just trying to play, have a good time, see how things unfold.”
North Carolina’s plan last year was to let Howell’s play and the team’s success speak for themselves, all of which went off the rails on the very first night of the season. If there was a Heisman contender in the Triangle this season, it looked like N.C. State quarterback Devin Leary, the preseason player of the year and the subject of some promotion by the school before his season-ending injury, or perhaps Maye’s teammate Josh Downs, who’s having an equally remarkable season at wide receiver.
Fate took a hand in this one, and with games still to play against N.C. State and Clemson, Maye has more than enough time left to ride the Tar Heels’ success all the way to New York, where the camera might once again pan unexpectedly to him.
Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at tinyurl.com/lukeslatest to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.
Luke DeCock’s Latest: Never miss a column on the Canes, ACC or other Triangle sports
