Mack Brown believes UNC is going to see an even better version of Drake Maye in 2023

Drake Maye was a sensation last season as the redshirt freshman quarterback for North Carolina. Even so, Mack Brown says to expect even better from him in his second run as their QB1.

Brown spoke highly of Maye in an interview on 99.9 The Fan last week. He said Maye’s improvement starts with the fact that, as a younger brother within a successful athletic family, he grew up as an extremely competitive person. That has lent itself to his growth during the last few months.

“Drake is a great person. He’s really, really hard on himself. He’s the younger of four brothers and two of them won national championships. One in basketball here and one at Florida with baseball. He’s got another brother that’s on our current basketball team,” said Brown. “So he’s been the little brother, been beaten up his whole life. He just competes at everything. So he’s really hard on himself.”

From there, Brown says Maye was very self-aware coming into this offseason. He knew what he wanted to work on and, with some of their additions to the staff in Chapel Hill, he believes he has improved where he was focusing on.

Now, with just over five weeks until kickoff, Brown anticipates an even better version of Maye to take the field due to that growth.

“After the season, he felt like he wanted help with his throwing motion. He wanted help with his feet, he wanted help with his presence in the pocket. So we were so fortunate to hire Chip Lindsey, who has two current NFL quarterbacks that he coached,” Brown said. “He’s got some really good teachers around him right now.”

“We feel like as good as he played last year? We’re going to see an even better version of Drake this fall,” stated Brown.

Maye threw for over 4,300 yards and 38 touchdowns on a 66.2% completion rate last season. He also rushed for seven more scores as the leader of a UNC offense that averaged 34.4 points per game, which was good for 26th in the country.

All that helped him sweep several awards in the conference as ACC Player of the Year, Offensive Player of the Year, Rookie of the Year, and Offensive Rookie of the Year as well as First-Team All-ACC.

Expecting better from him after being one of the best quarterbacks in the nation is asking a lot of Maye. Still, Brown believes his quarterback is up for it because of what he did over the offseason to take his game to the next level.