Drake Maye
Drake Maye, the New England Patriots quarterback and No. 3 pick in the 2024 NFL Draft, was the 2025 MVP runner-up and led New England to Super Bowl LX.
Drake Maye is the New England Patriots quarterback who, in the span of one offseason, turned a 4-win franchise searching for its post-Tom Brady identity into a Super Bowl participant. The No. 3 overall pick of the 2024 NFL Draft out of North Carolina, Maye followed a credible rookie year with one of the great second-season leaps in modern quarterback history: in 2025 he led the NFL in passer rating and completion percentage, carried New England to a 14-3 record, finished one vote shy of the Most Valuable Player award, and started Super Bowl LX. He is the central reason the Patriots became relevant again.
| Vitals | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 30, 2002 — Huntersville, North Carolina |
| Position | Quarterback |
| Teams | New England Patriots (2024–present) |
| Draft | 2024, Round 1, No. 3 overall (New England) |
| Contract | 4 years, $36.64M fully guaranteed, signed May 28, 2024 (Spotrac); as of Oct. 28, 2026 |
| Number | 10 |
North Carolina
The breakout. Maye arrived at North Carolina as a lightly used freshman in 2021, throwing just 89 yards across four games behind Sam Howell — appearing in the maximum number of games allowed while preserving his redshirt. When the job opened in 2022, he seized it completely. In 14 games he threw for 4,321 yards and 38 touchdowns against 7 interceptions, a school-record passing season that also made him a dual-threat problem on the ground.
The hardware. That season earned Maye a rare clean sweep of conference honors: 2022 ACC Player of the Year, Offensive Player of the Year, Rookie of the Year and Offensive Rookie of the Year, making him only the second player in league history to claim both the top and rookie awards in the same year. His 2023 follow-up was quieter by design — a new coordinator, a thinner receiving corps, and 3,608 yards with 24 touchdowns — but the prototype was set: 6-foot-4, 225 pounds, a live arm, and the willingness to run.
The draft and a rookie season
The pick. New England selected Maye third overall in the 2024 NFL Draft, behind Caleb Williams and Jayden Daniels, and signed him to a four-year, $36.64 million fully guaranteed rookie deal on May 28, 2024. He took over a team in transition and inherited little around him.
The rookie tape. Maye started 12 of the 13 games he appeared in, throwing for 2,276 yards, 15 touchdowns and 10 interceptions with an 88.1 rating while adding 421 yards and two scores on the ground. The numbers were ordinary; the flashes were not. He was named to the Pro Bowl Games as a replacement, the first marker that New England had drafted a franchise quarterback rather than a project.
The 2025 leap
The season. What followed in 2025 was a transformation. Maye started all 17 games and completed 354 of 492 passes for 4,394 yards, 31 touchdowns and 8 interceptions, with a 113.5 passer rating — the most passing yards by a Patriots quarterback since Tom Brady in 2017. He added 450 rushing yards and four touchdowns. His completion percentage climbed from 66.6 to 71.9, and he led the NFL in both passer rating and completion percentage.
The context. The jump lifted the entire franchise. New England finished 14-3, a ten-win improvement over 2024 that tied the largest single-season turnaround in NFL history. For the work, Maye was voted second-team All-Pro and named the PFWA Most Improved Player of the Year on January 23, 2026, recognition explicitly tied to the size of his year-two leap.
Super Bowl LX and the MVP vote
The run. As the AFC’s No. 2 seed, New England beat the Los Angeles Chargers 16-3, the Houston Texans 28-16, and the Denver Broncos 10-7 in the AFC Championship Game to reach Super Bowl LX — a rematch of Super Bowl XLIX against the Seattle Seahawks. Seattle won the title game 29-13, ending the Patriots’ season one game short.
The near-miss. The individual award came just as close. In the MVP vote, Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford edged Maye on the strength of 24 first-place votes to 23, finishing 366 points to 361. A single first-place ballot separated Maye from becoming the youngest MVP in franchise history.
The 2026 season
The follow-up. Through seven games of the 2026 season (as of Oct. 27, 2026), Maye had completed 141 of 214 passes for 1,784 yards, 13 touchdowns and 8 interceptions with a 96.4 rating, with the Patriots at 4-3 as his starting record. The interception total had already matched his full 2025 figure, and the efficiency had cooled from its 2025 peak — including a 321-yard, two-touchdown Week 7 effort in a 30-24 loss to the Bears. The sample remained young, and the full shape of the season was unsettled.
By the numbers
| Season | GP | Cmp% | Yds | TD | INT | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 13 | 66.6 | 2,276 | 15 | 10 | 88.1 |
| 2025 | 17 | 71.9 | 4,394 | 31 | 8 | 113.5 |
| 2026 (thru Wk 7) | 7 | 65.9 | 1,784 | 13 | 8 | 96.4 |
Per NFL.com, regular season, through Week 7 of 2026.
Career totals
Ranks
- 1st Passer rating, NFL 2025 (113.5)
- 1st Completion percentage, NFL 2025 (71.9)
- 1st Yards per attempt, NFL 2025 (8.9)
- 1st Total QBR, NFL 2025 (77.2)
Honors
- 2025 NFL MVP runner-up
- 2025 PFWA Most Improved Player of the Year
- 2025 AFC champion (Super Bowl LX)
- 2× Pro Bowl (2024, 2025)
- 2025 second-team All-Pro
- 2025 NFL passer rating & completion % leader
- 2022 ACC Player of the Year
- No. 3 overall pick, 2024 NFL Draft
Per NFL.com, the PFWA and the Associated Press via the Patriots, through Oct. 27, 2026.
The arguments
Should Maye have been the 2025 MVP? The vote was as close as the award gets. One camp, voiced by New England’s beat at NBC Sports Boston, held that Maye had the stronger statistical case — the league lead in passer rating, completion percentage and efficiency metrics, attached to the biggest single-season team turnaround in NFL history — and that the honor was effectively split hairs. The counter, reflected in the national ballot, favored Matthew Stafford and the Rams: 24 first-place votes to 23, with voters weighing Los Angeles’s profile and Stafford’s own numbers. Both sides agree the margin — one first-place vote, five total points — makes it the closest kind of result to argue over.
Was 2025 a true level or a peak? Maye’s 2025 efficiency was historically good, and whether it is his baseline or his ceiling is an open debate heading deeper into his career. The skeptical read points to the 2026 start: a rating down to 96.4 and an interception count that matched his entire 2025 total inside seven games, as chronicled in the week-to-week reporting. The optimistic read notes the sample is small, the team context shifted, and the floor he established across a full 17-game 2025 season does not vanish in a month. The question is unresolved on the dates recorded here.
Why it matters
Maye matters because he is the hinge on which New England turned from the Brady afterlife back into a contender. A franchise that spent the years after its dynasty cycling through quarterbacks found, in its 2024 top-three pick, a passer who in one season led the league in the metrics that most predict quarterback value and dragged a 4-win roster to within a game of a championship. Whether the 2025 version proves to be his standard or his summit, the second-season leap he authored is already one of the defining young-quarterback performances of the decade — and the reason the Patriots, for the first time in the post-Brady era, have an answer at the one position that decides everything.
