A year ago, the quarterbacks in the 2024 NFL Draft were all the rage. Drake Maye led the New England Patriots to the Super Bowl and was the MVP runner-up. Caleb Williams also helped the Chicago Bears win a division title, and Jayden Daniels was a year removed from a surprise NFC Championship Game appearance with the Washington Commanders.
Now, not even a month into Year 3 for the six quarterbacks taken in the first round of the 2024 draft, some cracks have emerged. Williams and Daniels have been sidelined due to injuries, while Michael Penix Jr. just returned from an ACL tear. The bigger focus this past week, though, was on Maye and J.J.
McCarthy. Maye has arguably been the worst starting quarterback in the NFL through the first three weeks of the season, with the Patriots getting out to an 0-2 start. The Minnesota Vikings, meanwhile, ripped the band-aid off the McCarthy experiment and traded him to the New York Giants for a fifth-round pick.
Why is Maye performing so badly, and are his problems fixable? What should we make of the Giants' trade for McCarthy? We asked those questions to people around the league, and many expressed concern for both quarterbacks.
Here's more from what we learned about Maye and McCarthy from our conversations with league insiders. Ralph Vacchiano: The New England Patriots have a lot of problems, but they never imagined Drake Maye would be one of them. Their third-year quarterback has been terrible so far this season, and fixing him will be a lot easier said than done — just ask some people around the league.
"He looks like a rookie, and not a particularly good one," one AFC scout told me. "If he were anyone else, based on those three games, the [coaching] staff would say, ‘He’s just not ready yet.’ "But how do you say that about a guy who nearly won MVP?" And that is the problem the Patriots are facing when they try to figure out what’s gone wrong with their 24-year-old quarterback, who has thrown six interceptions and just one touchdown pass this season, while losing two fumbles and failing to throw for more than 208 yards in any single game. They know he can do it.
He dragged them to the Super Bowl last season. He was basically one vote away from beating Matthew Stafford for the MVP. Now, this season, "He looks lost," another scout told me.
"His confidence is completely gone, and you can see why," the scout added. "He’s making comical errors — like real rookie stuff. The ball popping out of his hand, lofting it towards tightly covered receivers with no zip on the ball, not seeing any of the coverage in the area and thinking a guy is open, not stepping up in the pocket to avoid the rush, or stepping up into it.
"It seems like every other decision he makes is wrong." So what’s the solution? It might be, as one NFL assistant coach told me, the one thing the Patriots really can’t afford to do. "That’s the problem.
You can’t bench him, even though he looks like a guy who needs a few weeks on the bench," the coach told me. "What are you going to do, pull the guy who took you to the Super Bowl, the MVP runner-up, so he can watch Tommy DeVito play? That doesn’t do any good.
You might lose him even more. "They have to let him play through it. That’s all they can do.
The problem is, right now he doesn’t look like he can." Eric D. Williams: It seems like a long time ago, but New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye was the MVP runner-up last season for a reason. Maye finished first in the NFL in passer rating (112.9), third in passing touchdowns (31) and fourth in passing yards (4,394).
Maye also led the league in completion percentage (72%) and yards per attempt (8.9). But his 47 sacks during the season and New England’s easy schedule should have been a sign of things to come. Maye was sacked 21 times and finished with four turnovers in four postseason games.
As Ralph mentioned, Maye has thrown a league-high six interceptions and just one touchdown through three games, and his 58.6 passer rating is the worst among qualifying passers this season. And one talent evaluator told me that some of New England's moves this offseason might be to blame. "Maye carried this offense last year," a senior NFL personnel executive told me.
"He also had Stefon Diggs and Kayshon Boutte. With the A.J. Brown injury, he now has no one.
Another reason why I don’t like trading depth." Brown, who the Patriots surrendered a first-round pick to get, is on the injured reserve after suffering an ankle injury in Week 1. New England released Diggs, who was its leading receiver in 2025, at the start of the offseason to clear cap space. Kayshon Boutte, who had six touchdowns in 14 games last season, was traded toward the end of training camp, with head coach Mike Vrabel saying that he would've likely been a game-day scratch had he remained on the roster.
But while the people Ralph spoke with weren't sure how Maye and the Patriots get out of the hole they're in, another talent evaluator I spoke with offered a solution to get the quarterback back on the road to playing good football. "Simplify the offense like last year," the talent evaluator said. "Get A.J.
Brown healthy. And tell Drake to stop trying so hard. He is pressing." Vacchiano: The Giants’ decision to trade a fifth-round pick for quarterback J.J.
McCarthy was clearly an act of desperation in the wake of the season-ending injury to quarterback Jaxson Dart. Their hope is that McCarthy might turn out to be at least an upgrade over their current starter, Jameis Winston. But some around the league think that might be a little too much to ask.
"There’s no doubt McCarthy has talent," one scout told me. "He’s probably a good fit for what they want to do, too. But honestly, if the Vikings were willing to dump their one-time franchise quarterback for a fifth-round pick, you really got to wonder what they know.
Teams don’t usually dump young quarterbacks like that, especially ones they took 10th overall." To be fair, McCarthy has had injury issues. He missed his entire rookie season with a knee injury. Then last season, when he was finally the starter, he missed seven games with an ankle sprain, a concussion, and a fracture in his throwing hand.
Somewhere along the line, though, Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell lost complete faith in him. Because rather than give McCarthy his job back for 2026, the Vikings instead signed free agent Kyler Murray, a reclamation project, and even brought in veteran backup Carson Wentz. "Think about that," one NFL assistant told me.
"He couldn’t beat out Murray or Wentz. That doesn’t happen to a high first-round pick. That’s what happens with late-round and practice squad-type guys.
So that tells you everything about what Minnesota thinks of him. "Maybe a change of scenery will help. But O’Connell is pretty good with quarterbacks.
If he couldn’t get anything out of the kid, I don’t know if anyone on the Giants can." Williams: Two longtime NFL scouts I spoke with didn’t mince words when asked where they evaluated J.J. McCarthy when he entered the 2024 NFL draft. "Third round," said one.
"Fourth round," said the other. Of course, McCarthy was one of six quarterbacks taken in the first 12 picks, the fifth one taken by the Minnesota Vikings with the 10th overall pick. McCarthy won a national title at Michigan under head coach Jim Harbaugh, who said he was the best quarterback in the draft.
But Harbaugh also said Justin Herbert will be the greatest quarterback in NFL history, so we can take what he says with a grain of salt. One scout was skeptical McCarthy could turn things around with the New York Giants after the Vikings traded him for a fifth-round pick. "If Kevin O’Connell couldn’t do what he did with Sam Darnold and Joshua Dobbs filling in for Kirk Cousins — and it looks like he’ll do the same thing with Kyler Murray — then I don’t think Giants OC Matt Nagy can," the longtime NFL scout told me.
"Matt doesn’t have the kind of resume that Kevin has – no slight to Matt." Another NFL quarterback evaluator was more optimistic about a turnaround for McCarthy, considering Harbaugh’s older brother, head coach of the Giants John Harbaugh, should have all the intel on him from his time at Michigan. Along with that, McCarthy will have lowered expectations, serving as the backup to Jameis Winston, with Jaxon Dart still considered the quarterback of the future in New York. "A fresh start with people that chose him is a good thing," the talent evaluator told me.
"The Harbaugh history helps, too. Matt Nagy, I would think, knows what he’s doing, too. "It reminds me of when guys like Mac Jones, Sam Darnold or Baker Mayfield go somewhere to back up and hopefully become a starter somewhere else someday."
