How Many First-Round Picks Could the New England Patriots Get for Drake Maye?
· Yahoo Sports
Before any readers want to go postal, Drake Maye is not going to be traded. At least not for the foreseeable future. Maye has achieved what he set out to do last season by becoming the New England Patriots' franchise quarterback.
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But we're in the dog days of summer right now, and the football news cycle for the next few weeks is centered on a lot of hypothetical premises.
One of which is the theory of what the Patriots would get if they traded him at this very moment.
ESPN's Bill Barnwell played around with this idea in an article he wrote on Thursday. Out of the gate, Barnwell acknowledges that many of these are theoretical. The Patriots trading Maye elsewhere is indeed one of those.
If the Pats were to ship Maye out of town right now, Barnwell believes that the Patriots would get six first-round picks for their QB1.
"Well, when you're a 23-year-old quarterback who came within a couple of votes of winning league MVP in your second season, you're going to be worth a lot!" Barnwell writes. "We've seen quarterbacks make this sort of early-career leap and then stagnate before eventually leaving the organization, as Carson Wentz did after his breakout second season in Philadelphia. But Maye's auspicious 2025 campaign has to inspire confidence that he'll be a high-end QB for the next decade, if not longer."
The other major quarterback to compare a hypothetical trade to is fellow AFC East rival Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills. But even in that sense, Maye has the advantage.
"Maye also offers a significant financial advantage on quarterbacks such as Allen, given that he's a year away from even being eligible for a contract extension," Barnwell writes. "While the Patriots will surely make Maye the highest-paid quarterback in NFL history 12 months from now, they'll be able to use the fourth year of his rookie deal and a fifth-year option as a runway to smooth out the cap hits and cash payout of that contract. We could make a case that Maye is more valuable than Allen and should command more first-rounders given his age, but I do think there might be some hesitation about what Maye did in the postseason, when he wasn't the same caliber of quarterback against much stiffer competition. Even with that in mind, we're still talking about one of the most valuable players in all of football."
Again, all of this is hypothetical. At the stage of Maye's career, no organization would ever think about something like this. It’s still interesting to look at the gains for both parties if it were ever to happen.
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