If he wins the Big Game and nabs the MVP, New England’s young QB could become the hottest pitchman in the league.
When the New England Patriots take the field Sunday evening at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara against the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl LX, Pats quarterback Drake Maye will become the second-youngest signal caller to ever start a Super Bowl, at 23 years and 162 days old.
Only 10 quarterbacks under 25 have ever started the Big Game, including legendary Hall of Famers and future inductees Dan Marino, Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, and Ben Roethlisberger. Maye enters Super Bowl 60 coming off one of the best regular seasons in a long time for a quarterback his age, falling one first place vote shy of winning the NFL’s most valuable player award, finishing second to Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford in the closest MVP race in more than 20 years.
Maye was the third overall pick of the 2024 NFL draft, and quickly accumulated several key endorsement deals with the help of his agents at CAA. Key sponsorships include household names like Nike, Lowe’s, and Procter & Gamble, youth-focused apparel brand Abercrombie & Fitch, and wealth management firm Betterment.
“Maye has built a strong portfolio across key consumer touchpoints, an impressive lineup for such a young star,” Matt Fox, senior vice president of consumer PR from iconic advertising, marketing, and PR agency Ogilvy, told Boardroom.
Those companies signed on with Maye early on in his NFL career, hoping to reap the benefits and rewards of associating themselves with someone the Patriots hand picked to be the successor to Tom Brady, who guided the team to six Super Bowl championships and transformed New England from a middling franchise with just two Super Bowl appearances in over 30 years to one of the most storied and accomplished teams in NFL history.
“Nike P&G, and Lowe’s are effectively making long-term capital bets on his brand,” Jon Schwartz, a partner and the head of sports at lead PR and marketing firm Prosek, told Boardroom. “Quarterbacking the Patriots comes with a level of legacy equity that very few athletes inherit.”
Maye is already capitalizing on that equity. He’s just shy of 1 million followers on Instagram, and will likely pass that benchmark by the time you’re reading this. His 62.7 Instagram engagement rate, per Ogilvy data, far exceeds the industry benchmarks, and his content resonates and over-indexes with female fans and IG’s key 18-34-year-old demographic. It’s helped a challenger brand like Betterment see record traffic in commercials and social media campaigns featuring Maye.
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As New England surprisingly surged toward the top of the AFC regular season standings following a 3-14 season in Maye’s rookie year, holiday shoppers couldn’t get enough of the North Carolina native. Between Thanksgiving and Dec. 10, Maye was the top seller in NFL-related merchandise, according to Fanatics, and had the league’s second-highest selling jersey behind Green Bay’s Micah Parsons. Not surprisingly, Maye’s jersey was the top seller for the entire 2025 season in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire, per Lids data released this week. And compared with his rookie season of 2024, sales of Maye gear have increased “close to 500%” this season, per the Boston Globe.
And if the Patriots are victorious on Sunday, chances are likely that Maye would become the youngest Super Bowl MVP ever, surpassing 24-year-old Mahomes when he earned the honor in 2020. Only 25 of the 59 MVPs weren’t the winning quarterback, with just six of those instances occurring over the last 20 years.
“If Drake Maye were to deliver a Super Bowl, and especially an MVP, the market wouldn’t just reward the performance, it would revalue the brand,” Schwartz said. “From a business standpoint, that’s a multiplier moment where franchise history, media exposure, and commercial demand converge. A Super Bowl MVP would be value-creation event, rapidly re-pricing Maye from a high-potential asset to one of the most commercially powerful quarterbacks in the league.”
Winning a Super Bowl MVP with the Patriots would prove that the franchise is not just a one-era team, successfully passing the torch from Brady to a new era atop the league led by Maye. New England’s appeal would further expand to multiple generations of fans from the northeastern US to around the world.
“It would unlock even more significant brand potential, particularly with a new group of rising quarterbacks and their ability to reach younger, more socially-engaged NFL fans,” Fox said.
Not turning 24 until August, Maye has the ability and potential to become one of the NFL’s top earners off the field with a Super Bowl win and MVP, joining the likes of Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and Josh Allen among the league’s most lucrative pitchmen. While Maye’s career is already off to a strong start, he’s one win over Seattle on Sunday away from sending his career on and off the field into the stratosphere.
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