In sports, some siblings are so accomplished that they can be recognized by only their surnames. The Manning brothers. The Williams sisters. In North Carolina they have the Mayes: four brothers who are all strong athletes, born within about 5 ½ years.
Luke, the oldest, played basketball at the University of North Carolina and made the shot that sent the Tar Heels to the 2017 Final Four. Cole, the next brother, pitched at the University of Florida and won the College Baseball World Series. Beau, the third brother, also played basketball for the Tar Heels.
Then there’s Drake, the youngest. By his own description, he was the “runt” of the family. His brothers all grew to be around 6 feet, 7 inches, 6-8. Drake stopped a few inches shy of that. He was the “instigator,” the one who tried to get under the others’ skin.
“I was getting beat up on,” Drake once said. “Luckily, I was the most athletic, so I could run away. They couldn’t catch me.”
That runt is now the starting quarterback of the New England Patriots. He’s a finalist for league MVP, and on Sunday he’ll play the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl. All in his second year in the NFL. He’s still only 23. If Maye wins Sunday, he’ll become the youngest quarterback to have ever won a Super Bowl.
Drake’s coaches often credit his upbringing, as the youngest of four brothers, for his success: “If you were going to script a way for an athlete to grow up — to be tough and a leader and confident — you’d put him behind those three brothers,” Mack Brown, Drake’s college football coach, told NBC News. “Just because his whole life, he’s been in the backyard competing.”
Scott Chadwick, Drake’s high school football coach, said, “He had to be so competitive and such a fighter to survive in that family.”
In most cases, that might sound clichéd or hyperbolic. But perhaps they’re on to something.
“From a Darwinian point of view, we expect siblings to compete,” said Frank J. Sulloway, a research associate at Cal-Berkeley and an expert in the history of science, psychology and evolutionary biology. “It’s part of animal biology.”
Consider the blue-footed booby. It’s a large seabird native to the Galápagos Islands. When it gives birth, its offspring compete with one another. They compete for “parental investment,” Sulloway said, for the food and resources the parent provides. If food becomes scarce, the older sibling will actually kick the younger sibling out of the nest.
Human siblings behave similarly — minus the siblicide. We compete with our siblings for parental favor. It’s in our biology, too, the way we’re wired. That’s why we wrestle and argue and name-call and angle to get our way, even if we’re not consciously aware of why.
Through this process, younger siblings naturally develop tactics to help them survive and prosper. “It’s all about getting out of childhood alive,” Sulloway said.
In a sense, Drake was fighting for his life as a kid, playing pickup basketball with his brothers. The games were so physical, the stories go, their dad would have to break them up. “Anything keeping score, we just didn’t want to lose and have the bragging rights,” Drake said.
At Myers Park High School in Charlotte, Drake played power forward on the basketball team. He often had to guard much taller players. But he was the team’s best rebounder, and he initiated contact. “He’d put his shoulder into the [defender] to create space, and you could almost hear the air go out of their chest,” said Scott Taylor, the basketball coach.
Drake was known to chirp at times, too. “Every one of [the brothers] is a very good trash-talker,” said Chadwick, the high school football coach. “Drake, he can get in your head.”
One day, Chadwick remembered, they were playing golf — Drake and an assistant coach versus Chadwick and Luke Maye. They arrived at a hole where there was a body of water far to the left, way left, not really in play. As Chadwick approached the tee, Drake helpfully reminded him not to hit the ball there. Guess where the ball landed? Then Luke came up, and Drake said it again.
“And Luke hits the thing right in the water, too,” Chadwick said. “Immediately just starts cussing at Drake, telling him to shut up.”
For some time, Drake lived in his brothers’ shadows, especially after Luke won the Tar Heels that NCAA Tournament game. When Luke attended Drake’s high school football games, the school felt obligated to make an announcement “asking students not to bother Luke in the stands,” Chadwick said. “Because they would want to get Luke’s autograph, take pictures with him.”
Drake was becoming a star in his own right on the football field, which makes sense. Younger siblings often play more dangerous sports, research shows, as a way to differentiate themselves. Think: football, rugby, soccer. “You’re looking for another niche,” Sulloway said.
Playing quarterback, Drake seemed like a natural. “His throwing motion, he made it look so easy,” said Owen McCown, his friend and backup quarterback in high school. “The way the ball comes out in a tight spiral ... you’re like, damn, that’s how it’s supposed to look?”
His junior year, Drake threw 50 touchdown passes and only two interceptions. (His senior season was canceled because of the pandemic.)
Every major program seemed to want him: Alabama, Clemson, Tennessee. Mack Brown, the coach at North Carolina, thought Drake might come there, given his family ties. Mark Maye, the boys’ father, started at quarterback for North Carolina in the ’80s. Luke had gone there, of course, and Beau would, too. Beau was a promising basketball player before knee injuries derailed his career. He walked on to the North Carolina basketball team for a season and then worked as a student manager. He also helped coach the JV team.
But Drake? He chose to commit to Alabama. He called Brown to break the news. He said he wanted to win, and North Carolina wasn’t very good at the time. Brown had just taken over the program. The last coach had won five games, total, over the two previous years. Drake’s brothers had already won championships in college, and he wanted the same. “They always throw the rings in his face when he starts getting a little cocky with them,” Brown said.
That year, Brown brought the Tar Heels back to respectability, and Drake ended up flipping and committing to North Carolina. “I think (Drake’s] family probably recruited him, too,” Chadwick said. Drake would later room in college with his brother Beau, with whom he’s close.
Drake didn’t play for Carolina right away, though. He redshirted his first year, and, entering his second, he had to compete with another quarterback for the starting job. That summer, the players went through workouts, and Drake finished first in every drill. Brown laughed at the cornerbacks for losing to a quarterback. “He’s got long legs!” they said. “It’s not fair.”
Brown asked the upperclassmen: Between the two quarterbacks, which did they prefer?
“Drake is a competitor, man,” they said.
One day, Brown walked into the players’ lounge and found them all standing around, laughing and cutting up. There was a ping-pong table in the room. One of the paddles was broken.
“OK, who broke the paddle?” Brown asked.
They all pointed to Drake.
“Drake?” Brown said.
“I got beat by the tight end,” Drake said.
That competitive spirit fueled everything he did. Drake spent hours in the film room so he’d “know every little thing,” Brown said, to gain an edge. If Drake got dinged up, he refused to take practice off. He still played in the game. “And he just didn’t want to talk about it,” Brown said.
In 2022, Drake’s first year as a starter, he threw for more than 4,000 yards and 38 touchdowns and was named ACC Player of the Year. Brown remembers Luke Maye coming to practice at one point. “I’m sitting there thinking, here’s the [ACC] Player of the Year, and here’s a basketball player coming out here telling him how to throw,” Brown said. “But that’s his big brother.”
In 2024, on the eve of the NFL draft, Drake rented out space to play basketball with his brothers and friends. Luke Maye was playing professionally in Japan at the time; he had flown back to be there in person. The next day, the Patriots picked Drake No. 3 overall. At his introductory news conference, he said his brothers had “played a big part” in his reaching the NFL. He called them his “three best friends.”
They may have helped more than he knows.
Back in 2010, Sulloway and a research partner published a statistical study comparing siblings throughout the history of Major League Baseball. They found that younger siblings were likelier to hit home runs, likelier to be hit by pitches and 10 times likelier to try to steal a base. What do those plays have in common? They all require taking some sort of risk, in pursuit of a big reward. If you swing for the fences, you might strike out — but there’s a chance you’ll smack a home run.
“All the research shows younger siblings are more likely to take risks,” Sulloway said. “The younger sibling is trying to figure out a way to do better than the older sibling.”
This year, in the AFC championship game, Drake and the Patriots had the ball late in the fourth quarter, holding a three-point lead. They were playing in a blizzard, the field covered in snow. But if New England gained one more first down, it would most likely seal the game.
It was third and 5. The Patriots called a run play. As Drake went toward the running back, he faked the handoff, kept the ball himself and turned the other way, sprinting up field. He outraced a defender, got the first down and started chirping.
The play had caught everyone by surprise, including his teammates, apparently.
“After the game, Drake’s like, ‘I debated telling you guys if I was gonna [keep] it or not,’” one Patriot told the Boston Herald. “‘But I just decided not to.’”
That’s a “perfect example” of younger sibling behavior, Sulloway said. Drake had taken a risk, executed the perfect fake. Anything he could do to win. Anything to survive.
“In a Darwinian world,” Sulloway said, “you better be wired that way or you’re not going to make it.”
