Drake Maye's first Super Bowl appearance certainly didn't go how many expected. He was running for his life all game, being sacked seven times and he turned the football over three times as well. Even the 29-13 final score makes the game seem much closer than it actually was.
Still, despite the crushing loss, Maye Mania is very real in the hobby and appears to be here to stay.
If you look at GemRate's 50 most-graded athletes of all time, which the company released in January, the top 10 produces names you'd probably expect.
Michael Jordan, Ken Griffey Jr., Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Tom Brady, etc. There are really only two modern-day unicorns in the top heap, Shohei Ohtani and Victor Wembanyama.
And while Maye doesn't really have a chance of affirming himself in that list among graded cards - this was only his first full season as a starter - he is on par with, if not ahead of nearly everyone else in other metrics since the football season began.
Not even "His Airness" Michael Jordan had as many card sales over the previous 180 days. Maye leads all athletes with 159.9 sales, more than 10,000 more than MJ and over 50,000 more than anyone else. And if you extend the time frame to a full year, he still trails only Jordan, sitting more than 35,000 cards above third-place Jayden Daniels.
Perhaps what is even crazier though, to show just how robust Maye's market became, is the total amount of money spent on Maye's cards. Maye sits third on the leaderboard over the last 90 days, trailing just Jordan, Ohtani and James, who all have average sale prices of at least $345.
Maye's average sale? A cool $87.54, the lowest of anyone in the top 15 of sales volume. Over the last month, more money has been spent on Maye than Brady, Caleb Williams and Patrick Mahomes combined - No. 2, 3 and 4 in sales volume.
When you put up numbers like that, it's hard to ever imagine slipping out of the top tier of hobby relevancy. But who knows? Just as quickly as he jumped to the top of the heap, Maye could descend on the charts if he fails to live up to his potential.
Matt Liberman is a reporter and video producer for cllct, the premier company for collectible culture.