The New England Patriots have accomplished more over the past two-plus decades than any other franchise in professional sports, but they’ll add a first to their list in the summer of 2027.
Despite their 10 Super Bowl appearances and six championships since the popular documentary series debuted in 2001, the Patriots have never been featured on Hard Knocks. Thanks to the league loosening its guidelines for team selection, the NFL Films crew will shoot their first training camp series in Foxboro next summer.
On the surface, 2027 feels like the sweet spot for the Patriots. They’ll be entering Year 3 of the Mike Vrabel era, with the chance to show off their brand new practice facility not only to fans, but to future free agents. New England hasn’t felt like much of a destination since Tom Brady left the team in 2020, but that tide is turning thanks to Vrabel’s ability to bring people together and establish a culture, and with quarterback Drake Maye rapidly becoming one of the most marketable players in the league.
There could be one, giant elephant in the room once those cameras start rolling, though.
The 2027 offseason is when Maye becomes eligible for a contract extension, and how the team handles what will be by far the biggest contract commitment in franchise history could say everything about how the producers handle Episode 1 of Hard Knocks that summer.
Hard Knocks may have just set a deadline for Drake Maye’s 2027 extension
By the time July of 2027 rolls around, Patriots fans will be itching to get a behind-the-scenes look at a team that became instantly more lovable during Vrabel's first year.
There’s a very real chance, however, that their excitement gets derailed by watching Tommy DeVito lead the Patriots’ first-team offense while Maye stands off to the side in a white T-shirt, politely declining to speak to the production crew.
Maye, of course, will be under contract in 2027. In the NFL’s current landscape of rookie-scale contracts for former first-round selections, the first step of any major negotiation starts with picking up the player's fifth-year option.
That happens each league year before May 1; as Vrabel hinted this past week at the NFL’s annual meetings in Phoenix, the Patriots will likely pick up the fifth-year option on top cornerback Christian Gonzalez sometime in the next few weeks.
But while Gonzalez is technically under contract, he’s highly unlikely to step foot on the grass this summer without a new deal, even after the team triggers a fifth-year option that would guarantee him $18.1 million in cash for the 2027 season, per Spotrac. The issue is how the money in these rookie deals gets paid out. Gonzalez, for example, received over 57 percent of his $15.1 million rookie contract in Year 1 of the deal. For the 2026 season, he’s set to earn just $2.8 million in cash.
That’s obviously not going to fly for one of the best young cornerbacks in football. The Patriots can buy themselves time with the fifth-year option, but their only real decision is to either pay Gonzalez a top-market extension or look to trade him for a treasure trove of future draft capital.
The team will repeat this process with Maye next year, only to a much higher degree. This year, he’s coming off an All-Pro season that ended in the Super Bowl. Next year, he’ll be eligible to become the highest-paid player in NFL history.
Maye will take home $4.1 million in 2026 cash on his rookie deal, but won’t be extension eligible until he accrues a third year of service time. The team thus has the luxury of building around one of the biggest bargain cap numbers in the league this season, while planning for when the real checks come due next year. Maye's fifth-year option for 2028 will be sizable, likely in the neighborhood of $45 million, and he’s been such a team-first player that it’s hard to envision him as a training camp hold-in.
This is how business is done in the NFL, however, and with an extension that should pay him north of $60 million per season firmly on the table, Maye owes it to the other 2,000-plus players in the league to get paid what he's worth.
Drake Maye carries a 4 year, $240M ($60M APY) valuation in our system.
— Spotrac (@spotrac) February 8, 2026
However, he doesn't become extension-eligible until after the 2026 season.
Instead, he'll earn $4.1M next season, carrying a $9.9M cap hit with the #Patriots.
He'll likely enter the summer of 2027 as a clear-cut top-five quarterback in the league. And with NFL Films in town to shoot training camp, the Patriots will need to have their ducks in a row to make sure the star of the show is on the field.
The Krafts are likely already preparing for the most important contract negotiation in their franchise’s history, and if that deal isn’t done by July of 2027, there’s a slim-to-none shot Maye will be on the field on Day 1 of camp. He’d be risking everything for just a $4.6 million cash salary that year, per Spotrac.
From a 10,000-foot view, having Hard Knocks in Foxboro should be a good thing for everyone. But the team definitely just gave itself a deadline on Maye’s deal, and for a franchise known for being a notorious contract stickler, next year’s show could get a lot more interesting than anyone expected.