What’s the deal with Drake Maye? Fantasy football analyst Matt Harmon breaks it down

Given the heights they reached last season, the New England Patriots have been the NFL’s biggest disappointment through the first three weeks. The team is 1-2, and their offense has been a complete mess. Last season, in the aggregate offensive efficiency metrics I like to look at, they were the third-best unit in the league.

So far this season, they are 25th. Without a doubt, that side of the ball has been the culprit. 

To put into perspective what’s gone wrong with this team, they rank 11th in time of possession per drive but dead last in points per drive. They are taking plenty of time to go absolutely nowhere. 

The offensive collapse, which he has contributed to, has completely sunk Drake Maye in fantasy football. After being drafted as the consensus QB3 in drafts this summer, Maye is the 34th-highest-scoring player at the position through three weeks.

Case Keenum, who has started one game, has outscored Maye. 

For starters, no one should absolve Maye of blame. Team situations and the roster around you will change over the course of what we all hope is a long career for a promising quarterback. When it’s weaker, as this team very much is right now, you can’t make a bad situation worse. Maye is doing just that, with brutal misfires and day-one-install mistakes at the most destructive times. 

I’ve seen enough from Maye to know that if he can regain confidence — something I’m worried about right now — he can get back on track and play better in isolation. I don’t have the same faith in the rest of the ecosystem.

Maye has been bad; his situation might be worse

Much was made of “the schedule” when trying to discredit the Patriots’ run to the Super Bowl last season. Despite how their season ended, I felt it was a bit overblown at the time. Yet, the more I reflected on how the offense performed in the postseason and especially with how it’s looked so far in 2026, I’m starting to wonder if the current version of the Josh McDaniels system is specifically a “bad-team-beater” but isn’t dynamic enough to hang with creative, modern defenses. The unit’s passing concepts and principles aren’t offensive and are sound overall, but they don’t do much to put defenders in conflict or muddy the picture. 

The Patriots are 26th in motion rate overall and 23rd in motion at the snap, per Fantasy Points Data. Last season, they ranked 26th and 32nd. It’s a static offense pre-snap. They’re also 29th in play action so far this season. With teams playing more quarters and Cover 2 these days, you need to throw those kinds of changeups to hold defenders and create space for receivers. None of that has been happening for the Patriots in either of the last two seasons. 

Again, nothing McDaniels and this staff put out there is bogus or net-negative — pass protection rules notwithstanding — it’s just not additive. When that’s your mode of operation, you can punk bad defenses. The Patriots have gone against three strong defensive units in Seattle, Pittsburgh and Jacksonville through three weeks and they just don’t ever put that level of competition off balance. 

It’s especially apparent in their receiver usage. All the best systems right now are blurring the lines between slot and boundary players, using their X-receivers to exploit vulnerabilities in the intermediate areas of zone coverage with dig and out routes. New England is more old-school, with a stationary X-receiver who runs vertical routes, a traditional small-slot route tree and a Z who doesn’t go in motion to kick inside often. 

I could hear an argument that Kayshon Boutte and Kyle Williams are just your classic sacrificial X-receivers, but this has been consistent regardless of who lines up there for McDaniels in New England. We only got to see one half of A.J. Brown in Week 1 but he was used as a stationary X for most of the night. 

Since Week 2, Romeo Doubs has replaced Brown as the X, taking a whopping 93.7% of his snaps outside. Doubs looked ticketed for a part-time Z role in Week 1, which is strange, considering he was paid decent money and never operated with that deployment in Green Bay — he was its X-receiver. So, on its face, this seems like a fine idea. However, as is common with this player in the offense, he has run a go route on 26% of his routes, per PFF, and a curl on 21%. Those straight-line patterns don’t reflect how effective he was as a route-runner with the Packers in 2025. 

Not knowing your personnel like this, and rather just sticking to the tenets of the system, is a canary-in-the-coal-mine signal for me. 

Based on how little the pass game design has changed this season, and their willingness to just shove Doubs into the X route tree run by the vertical options in 2025, it seems clear to me that the Patriots’ plan was to essentially run everything back that we saw last year but with a talent advantage at X receiver now in Brown. Frankly, they were going to be threading a needle doing so, even with Brown, because he’s a declining receiver who needs more role catering than that. Without him, it’s the same unit that all the top defenses in the AFC and Seattle solved in the postseason last year with ease but with, arguably, worse receivers.

Doubs is a fine boundary starter, but on an ill-suited route diet. Dipping from Stefon Diggs to DeMario Douglas at slot receiver is debilitating. Mack Hollins leads this unit in snaps this season; enough said. On the rare occasions Kyle Williams plays (24% of snaps), he still just lines up outside (93%) and runs go routes (41%). I get it — he’s your fastest guy, sure, and not a perfect player by any means. But that makes no sense given what he was on tape as a prospect as a slot and Z receiver who got open quickly and made plays with the ball in his hands.

As Nate Tice pointed out on Football 301, the Patriots receivers are the slowest in the league, per Next Gen Stats, and have broken zero tackles this year. It’s just not a good group. 

The running game and offensive line remain major problems as well. New England leads the NFL in gap run rate at 60.3%. They are 21st in yards per carry and 24th in success rate on gap runs. Overall, they’re 31st in explosive rushing rate and 31st in yards before contact per rush. TreVeyon Henderson had a long run in Week 2 but ranks 49th out of 50 running backs with 20-plus opportunities this season in rushing success rate and 34th in yards after contact per rush. While the offensive line has been acceptable in pass protection, even if the scheme is rough, the run blocking is dire. The loss of Michael Onwenu to an ankle fracture and the drop-off from Morgan Moses won’t help matters going forward.

As a reminder, none of this is meant to absolve Drake Maye of some of his brutal and costly mistakes. It’s a truly bad situation and he is making it worse. No one with any level of objectivity would say he doesn’t look like a fundamentally different player than he was last year. 

It’s a small sample size, and I still believe in Maye as a long-term, good starting quarterback. However, because of all these other variables, even if he does suddenly turn it on and cut the mistakes while playing with much more confidence, I’m skeptical that would be enough to get him anywhere near the production we saw in 2025. That includes whenever A.J. Brown, a declining 29-year-old receiver playing at less than 100% after a high-ankle sprain, returns. 

Maye can comfortably be dropped in fantasy football right now. It will be some time, if ever, before he comes close to a top-10 spot in weekly rankings this season.