By Adam
Drake Maye is going off draft boards as the second quarterback in fantasy, ahead of everybody but Josh Allen, and I think that is a mistake. Not because Maye is a bad player. Because that price only makes sense if last season happens again, and the biggest number in last season is not going to happen again.
Start with the number. Maye threw a touchdown on 6.30% of his passes last year, 31 scores on 492 attempts. His rookie rate was 4.44%. That jump, in one offseason, is the single engine behind his leap from a promising young quarterback to the No. 2 fantasy finish, 352.0 points, just 12.6 behind Allen. And touchdown rate is exactly the stat you should trust least from one year to the next. It swings with red-zone luck, with a handful of bounces, with which defender slips on which Sunday. When a quarterback posts a career-high rate in the same season everything else breaks right, the next season almost always hands a chunk of it back. Settle Maye at 5% on the same volume and six touchdowns disappear, roughly 25 points. That alone drops him out of the argument with Allen and back into the pack.
Now, the case for him is real and I want to state it fairly, because the improvement was not all luck. His second season was genuine development across the board: 4,394 yards against 2,276 as a rookie, completion rate up from 66.6% to 72.0%, yards per attempt from 6.73 to 8.93, interceptions down to 8 from 10 on far more throws, lost fumbles cut from six to three. The floor was remarkable too. His worst game all season was 12.12 points, he had exactly one game under 15, and nine of his 17 cleared 20. None of that is fake. Maye is a very good young quarterback and he is going to have a long career of being drafted early.
But look at what pick 51.6 is actually asking you to believe. It prices the touchdowns staying at a career-high rate, the health holding for 17 games again, and a rebuilt receiver room clicking immediately. This site's rosters now show A.J. Brown in New England, and the optimists will tell you a true number one receiver props up the touchdown rate. Maybe. It is also a brand-new connection in a reshuffled offense, and August is when every new weapon looks like an upgrade and none of them has run a route that counts. I am not paying a fifth-round pick to find out.
Here is the other half of the argument, and it is about the position, not the player. Quarterback is deep. Maye himself proved last year that the guy who finishes second at the position can be a fifth-round pick nobody fought over, because his own ADP a year ago reflected a 15-touchdown rookie, not a 31-touchdown sophomore. Somebody is going to be this season's version of that pick, a quarterback going three rounds later who finishes within a few points a game of the top names. The one predictable thing about the position is that paying up for last year's leaderboard is how you miss him. At 51.6, Maye costs a pick where starting receivers and running backs still live, the players you cannot find on waivers in October. A quarterback within two points a game of him will be sitting there two, three, four rounds later. One always is.
So my position is simple. The player is real, the development is real, the floor is real, and the price is wrong anyway. His ADP runs as high as 31 and as low as 70 in this site's data, and those are two completely different bets. At the low end of that range, past pick 65 or so, the regression is priced in and I am interested, because a 5% touchdown rate version of Maye is still a weekly starter with a bulletproof floor. At 51.6, as the second quarterback off the board, you are paying retail for a career year at the most replaceable position in fantasy. Let one of your league mates do that. Take the receiver, take the running back, and let the quarterback come to you.
What to watch before week 1: where he actually goes in your room, not where the aggregate says. If the Maye drafter in your league pays the QB2 price, the discount flows to everyone else at the position. Someone at that table is getting a top-five quarterback three rounds later. Be that person.
Figures read from this site's own player pages and ADP on 23 August 2026. Draft pedigree from the site's player id data.