Mack Brown provides glowing assessment of Drake Maye's performance Saturday

Drake Maye made a heck of a first impression for Tar Heels fans this season. The broad-framed North Carolina QB debuted as a starter against Florida A&M, finishing with 294 yards, five touchdowns while completing 29 of 37 passes on the day. He cooked the Rattlers.

So, of course, his head coach, Mack Brown, had nothing but admiration for his young passer’s season-opening performance. In fact, Brown claimed it was one of the best debuts he’s ever seen from a quarterback. Nearly 300 yards and five touchdowns with no picks is about as good as you can do, frankly.

So here was Brown, heaping the praise onto Drake Maye following the 56-24 win over Florida A&M:

“Very proud of Drake. One of the best first games I’ve ever seen. He was poised. He was accurate. His running ability was good,” said Brown, before explaining why Maye’s frame and size are such an advantage.

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“Yeah he is very accurate. Got great vision. He’s a good decision maker and he’s big. He’s 6-5, 200 pounds. So he can see. He looks thin. He’s really not. He’s a big guy that obviously can really run. I think the thing that surprised us the most is how fast he is. And and we saw that some in his summer work because he won a lot of the races in the summer. And I told the kids I saw those defensive backs and wide receivers. Drake’s beating you man. And he said his legs are longer. But they knew that they watched him this summer so they they knew that he’s got some special skills.”

Obviously Maye torched the opposition purely from a passing perspective. But beyond launching long-bomb touchdowns, Mack Brown was very pleased with Maye’s game-managing ability. As in, avoiding sacks, keeping everybody on the same page, audibles, avoiding penalties, etc. Equally important stuff.

“We did not have a sack. Had very few penalties, I think. We might have we had the holding penalty at the end of the game. That was down there at the one yard line. But other than that, when the the older guys were playing we didn’t have a penalty. We had the one they called with the one-minute drill, but they didn’t take it. So we had the one-off sides they didn’t take, defensively. So we had one penalty on offense.”

Three Benjamin Franklin’s worth of passing yardage, five touchdowns, and a clean game across the board from Maye in his debut. What more could you want?