Despite the ongoing Christian Gonzalez contract situation, despite the concerns over depth in various spots on the roster, and despite the lack of a real pass-rushing group, the Patriots’ season is largely going to come down to the way Drake Maye performs after his near-MVP season a year ago.<\/p>\n
That is, of course, an overly simplistic view, but there’s simply no position in any sport more central to team success than quarterback. And with a number of critical pieces added around him — along with Maye being able to work with the same offensive coordinator for a second consecutive season, a luxury he hasn’t enjoyed since high school — there’s plenty of reason in New England to believe Maye is in line to have an even better 2026 season<\/a> than the one he just completed.<\/p>\n That’s the perspective in New England, at least. Around the league, skeptics remain.<\/p>\n That much was clear earlier in the summer, when ESPN polled coaches, executives and scouts to rank every position and Maye came in at No. 8<\/a> among QBs. And it’s once again the case in a similar poll conducted by The Athletic<\/a>.<\/p>\n Jeff Howe polled “general managers, high-ranking executives, head coaches, coordinators and other coaches” to cast votes in various areas, and Maye was notably omitted in two key categories.<\/p>\n The 20-person panel was asked to predict who will be the MVP in 2026. None of the votes were cast for Maye.<\/p>\n Maye received 23 first-place MVP votes last year, one fewer than the winner of the award, Matthew Stafford. Maye was five voting points behind Stafford (366 to 361), while Buffalo’s Josh Allen was a distant third with just 91 voting points (and two first-place votes).<\/p>\n Despite that breakout season, none of the 20 people polled believe a repeat season is in store. <\/p>\n Josh Allen received eight votes, while Stafford and Joe Burrow each received three votes. Two people selected Bijan Robinson (a running back hasn’t won the award since 2012), two other people picked Dak Prescott (he finished second in MVP voting in 2023 but has not been top-five in any other season in his 10-year career), and Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson received one vote apiece.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Howe noted that Stafford received zero votes in this poll a year ago before authoring the first MVP season of his lengthy career.<\/p>\n Clearly, folks around the league are not rushing to anoint Maye as the next great QB, even with last year’s success. And that belief showed through when the 20 voters were asked to rank the three best quarterbacks in the NFL.<\/p>\n Zero of the 60 votes cast in that category were for Maye.<\/p>\n Allen garnered the most votes (19), followed by Mahomes (16) and then Stafford (15). Burrow (6), Jackson (3) and Prescott (1) were the only other quarterbacks to receive votes.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The result of zero votes expecting Maye to win MVP is not particularly provocative, but it would stand to reason that one of the 20 people polled might consider Maye a top-three QB in the NFL after having a better season than Allen. Alas, Maye’s going to need to display consistency as an elite quarterback before getting the NFL to buy in to his long-term potential. (Or he’s going to need to simply be the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys, which appears to be enough to be considered one of the three best quarterbacks in the world.)<\/p>\n With that being said, there is plenty of belief in Maye relative to his young peers in the league, as Howe asked the panel to name the best quarterback on a rookie contract. Maye was the runaway winner in that category with 12 votes. Caleb Williams was a distant second with five votes, followed by Jayden Daniels (2) and Bo Nix (1).<\/p>\n Clearly, Maye is on plenty of radars after his work last season, and he’s built up some belief around the league that he’s going to continue to grow as a pro quarterback. But in terms of being considered among the very best in the league, the just-turned-24-year-old has a bit of work to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite the ongoing Christian Gonzalez contract situation, despite the concerns over depth in various spots on the roster,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":880109,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,5374,449416,1231,593,85],"class_list":["post-880108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-drake-maye","tag-michael-hurley","tag-new-england-patriots","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=880108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/880109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=880108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=880108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=880108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}