He’s the quarterback for the New England Patriots. He’s an internet sensation — alongside a viral fan account. He’s the MVP favorite. He’s won seven straight games. He’s tied for first in the AFC, with a stranglehold on the AFC East over the preseason heavy-favorite Buffalo Bills. Heck, he beat those very Buffalo Bills in Buffalo on Sunday Night Football. In short, he’s Drake Maye.

More broadly, he’s this year’s new hot quarterback, on whom everyone prescribes the future of the league because of a meteoric rise that always happens sooner than you expect. Two years ago, we had C.J. Stroud. Last year, we had Jayden Daniels. And next year, we’ll have someone else.

But right now, we have Drake Maye, who differs from Daniels and Stroud in that this is not his rookie season. He was thrown into a horrendous Patriots team last year with no offensive line, no defense, no receivers, and no run game — left with only a tight end (Hunter Henry) and decent special teams, New England intended for Jacoby Brissett to play most of the year. But he was shockingly bad, forcing Maye to play and embrace the consequences.

The hype of his two forebearers has peetered out and then some, and it’s worth wondering if declaring someone “the future” after a small sample size of games is really the best idea. Like with all quarterbacks, life got harder for Daniels and Stroud after teams had a full season of tape with which to thwart them, and once a full season of NFL hits had led to real injuries. That will happen to Maye, no matter how crafty.

Also, unlike Stroud and Daniels, Maye’s team got wildly better in his second year (you could argue Stroud’s team was similar his second year, but became gobsmackingly worse his third). New England lost 13 games Maye’s rookie year, so getting better wasn’t that hard. And their last-place schedule looked hilariously easy… surely improving will be a cakewalk?

The concerns for Maye coming out of the draft was inexperience; he played very few games at UNC, and was totally unlike contemporaries Daniels, Michael Penix, and Bo Nix, all of whom were in their mid-20s and had started a combined quadrillion NCAA football games before coming into the league. But we weren’t sure how Maye would work within an NFL system, even if his talent was undeniable. His rookie year didn’t give him much of a chance, but if this year was a door… opportunity knocked.

The Patriots didn’t go slowly-but-surely with team building to keep some continuity for the young quarterback. They decided that everything-but-Drake-Maye was the problem and got to work. They fired their first year head coach Jerod Mayo, hired big-name replacement Mike Vrabel, signed several impact defensive players, drafted a left tackle, Will Campbell, fourth overall, signed Stefon Diggs to lead the receiving corps, and said check ball.

Maye has succeeded within that structure, but has also molded it to his special skill set. A Patriots team that couldn’t complete a deep shot for five years suddenly is the most explosive passing offense in the league. Maye’s deep ball placement is unreal, and it’s uncorked every ounce of a layered Patriots attack, forcing defenses to play over the top and opening up Diggs and Henry over the middle.

He’s also completely unafraid (occasionally to his detriment), trying to hit home runs constantly and fit balls into windows only someone with a top 1% arm could try. He’ll get a feel for what he can and can’t do as he gets more reps in the NFL, but I’d much rather have a quarterback who wants to use their skills to create offense, rather than one too scared to try. I’ve seen so many talented passers fail because they wouldn’t stop panicking. Maye doesn’t panic, and over time, fortune favors the bold.

Right now, Maye looks like he could be the next thing, like Stroud and Daniels before him. But why has he captured popular imagination, on the internet, in betting markets, and among fans who have every reason to hate the Patriots but, for some reason, don’t want to hate Drake Maye? Why do we anoint these quarterbacks with so little data and obsess over their success and failure?

Because he’s good, legitimately good, not just good in a system like Jared Goff or good in theory like Anthony Richardson. He’s a good quarterback in a vacuum, and the Patriots are 8-2 because of Drake Maye. They aren’t winning because he’s doing his job, they’re winning because he is the job. And when you have a guy like that, you have to bring out the pedestal.

Football is a unique sport in that its watchability is directly tied to the ability of a single player: the quarterback. Watching a terrible quarterback matchup can be morbidly interesting, but isn’t really fun long-term. But Drake Maye is good and thus makes the Patriots watchable, which increases the number of teams that are fun to watch. The disappointment at Daniels’ injury and Stroud’s regression is because we need the good quarterbacks for the game to thrive. And when we find a new one, it’s really exciting.

Is Drake Maye going to lead the Patriots to their seventh Super Bowl championship this year? Probably not. I mean, it’s one thing to make things happen in the regular season against terrible teams, it’s another to… beat Patrick Mahomes and/or Josh Allen and/or Lamar Jackson in the AFC playoffs. And while I won’t put a cap on their potential (I’m a Patriots fan after all, why would I?), I’m not going to actually predict that will happen.

His next step probably won’t be a Super Bowl, but rather transitioning his hype into stable production. Daniels and Stroud have yet to carve out their niche, but people forget about Lamar Jackson’s party train, which turned jokes about how he was a running back into the single most electrifying dual threat in the league. Jackson took his weaknesses and turned them into strengths. If he wants to get out of the hype soup and into the pantheon, Maye will have to discover his, and then eliminate them.

Wins are a quarterback stat, and championships are generally too. But the point of this Drake Maye season isn’t that he’s necessarily going to win it all; the point is that he’s good, will continue to be good, and is capable of succeeding at the highest level of the hardest position in all of sports. There are like… twelve people on earth who are capable of playing NFL quarterback well. Drake Maye has a chance to be even better than that. That’s really something.