Drake Maye Trade Would Get Patriots a Record-Setting Return originally appeared on NESN.
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Drake Maye isn’t getting traded.
But at this point in the NFL offseason, it’s easy to dig into hypotheticals — like, “How much would it cost another team to trade for the New England Patriots‘ franchise quarterback?”
That’s the question that ESPN’s Bill Barnwell attempts to answer in a new article on Thursday.
Barnwell acknowledges right from the jump that many of these ideas are theoretical and not ones that a team would actually carry out. The idea of the Pats trading Maye definitely falls into that category.
But if it happened? Barnwell estimates that the Patriots could get six first-round picks in return for Maye.
“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.”
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Within the AFC East, Barnwell had assessed Bills QB Josh Allen to be worth seven first-round picks. But at least on the contract front, Maye actually 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.”
A quarterback of Maye’s age and talent has never been traded at the peak of his powers, so it’s also impossible to know exactly how the league might react.
The reality is that if the Pats chose to trade Maye, he’d not only get picks back, but other players, too.
It would be one of the most shocking deals in NFL history, and you shouldn’t expect anything like this to happen anytime soon.
It’s fun to think about, though, and really emphasizes just how highly thought of Maye really is across the league.
