Caleb Williams Can Learn A Very Important Lesson From Drake Maye’s Super Bowl Struggles

As someone who enjoys both Caleb Williams and Drake Maye—crazy, I know—the Super Bowl was a tough watch.

Not only did New England’s supporting cast on offense fail to live up to the moment all around, Maye was quite simply awful. Whether it was due to his shoulder injury, a lack of confidence about his pass protection, or just straight up not having it—or some combination of all that—he flopped hard on the big stage and is taking body shots across the league for his postseason play.

As much as some are using this as a chance to dog his MVP candidacy further, the Seattle Seahawks’ game plan for Maye basically treated him like he was the only thing they had to stop.

“We knew he's their whole team,” Seahawks linebacker Uchenna Nwosu said after the game, according to ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler. “We knew if we affected him, their whole gameplan would be nothing.”

And so it happened: the Seahawks hounded Maye relentlessly, and Maye gave the ball away three times in the crushing loss.

Through it all, some of the hero-ball habits Maye fell into in college were exacerbated, leading to worsened mechanics and even worse decisions late in the game as he self-destructed by trying to do too much in the face of overwhelming odds.

That, right there, is what Williams should be thinking about as he prepares to mount his own Super Bowl run in 2026.

This past season marked a major turning point for Williams in terms of his sack reduction, taking care of the football, and playing better within structure as the year progressed. After struggling mightily early in the season to make plays happen when he was on the run, he learned how to cut his losses, scrambling more to pick up key yardage and simply throwing the ball away when he had to. Then, later in the year, he was able to harness his insane play-making into some of the greatest plays we’ve ever seen from a Bears quarterback.

On top of that, Williams has Ben Johnson, one of the NFL’s best offensive schemers in his corner, and far better weapons and protection than anything Maye has at his disposal. As such, focusing everything on Williams might not work as easily against the Bears, who proved they could win plenty even without Williams playing great.

That said, this coming season is a new beast entirely, and teams have now seen how Williams plays in this offense. They also know Williams is still at his best outside of structure and will likely try to force him to create more, causing him to forsake the system Johnson has put around him.

Though Williams shouldn’t deny his special talents, he must, by all means, avoid the trap we just saw Maye fall into: trying to do it all yourself because you’re becoming desperate; letting your eyes betray you rather than seeing the game in front of you; and compounding mistakes with even bigger ones. That’s how you play your team out of a game rather than keeping them in it—the latter of which Williams did exceptionally well in 2025.

The bottom line: don’t buy into the narratives—all the MVP talk, re-drafts, any of that. Don’t make it about you vs. the 11 guys on the other side. Because if you do, the 11 guys will win every time in this game. Williams has shown a lot of growth as far as playing within himself, demonstrating much more poise than Maye did in the postseason. But he hasn’t had to do it in the Super Bowl…yet.

When he does—because he will one day—hopefully Williams can look back on the lesson his fellow classmate learned, and take the next step forward.

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