The trade that percolated for four months finally happened Monday, when the Eagles stopped pretending they had multiple suitors for A.J. Brown and traded the once-dominant boundary wideout to the Patriots in exchange for a 2028 first round draft pick.
Brown, for whom the enemy speaks quietly and holds a knife, had begged and pleaded throughout the 2025 season for the Eagles to get him out of Philadelphia. Brown was never all that interested in an offense that simply could not produce a glut of targets for him. He felt, according to Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer, “held back” in a Philly offense that was, as recently as 2024, top-five in EPA per play.
For a true alpha receiver, championships are fine. Targets are better.
Patriots Fallout
In New England, Brown will finally be the unquestioned No. 1 guy. He won’t need to make passive-aggressive jokes about being Robin to Devonta Smith’s Batman. Stefon Diggs is gone. Mack Hollins is no threat. Kayshon Boutte is no threat (and might not be on the Pats’ Week 1 roster).
Here’s the thing about Brown’s statistical prospects in the Pats offense: They will hinge primarily on better quality of downfield targets. He will not, however, enjoy the fruits of an offense that produces cargo ships full of pass attempts and air yards. New England’s offensive profile in 2025 was strikingly similar to the Eagles:
- The Drake Maye-led Patriots averaged 259 total team air yards per game; the Jalen Hurts-led Eagles averaged 244.
- The Patriots had a 12.5 percent downfield passing rate; the Eagles went downfield on 13.4 percent of their attempts.
- The Pats ended the 2025 regular season with 502 pass attempts; the Eagles had 497.
- New England’s offensive line situation was far worse, as the Pats allowed a 12.5 percent pressure rate over expected while the Eagles were at 7.7 percent.
Drake Maye 72% Completion, 4,394 Passing Yards, 450 Rushing Yards, 35 Total TDs 2025 NFL Full Season Highlights.pic.twitter.com/8fnnYDS8fl https://t.co/ihk8VncHk5
— Football Performances (@NFLPerformances) January 5, 2026
The median outcome for Brown in the New England offense is probably better than the median outcome in Philadelphia, considering how run-heavy the Eagles have been when their offense is clicking and game script is on their side. And his high-end outcome is certainly superior if he indeed dominates targets and air yards the way he wanted in Philadelphia.
Maye — one of the last deep ball merchants in football — wrecked opposing secondaries downfield in his breakout 2025 campaign. It didn’t seem to matter that Hollins and Boutte were his only two deep options for much of the season -- Maye just let it rip. (Hollins was graded by PFF as the league’s 68th best downfield receiver; Boutte was 10th).
- Only Sam Darnold had a higher adjusted yards per attempt on attempts of over 20 yards.
- Only 3 percent of Maye’s downfield throws were considered turnover worthy.
- Maye averaged nearly 60 passing yards per game on deep throws in 2025, the fourth highest average in the NFL.
- Maye was ultra-accurate on deep tosses: He was 17.5 percent over his expected completion rate on such throws, trailing Darnold and Brock Purdy. Hurts, meanwhile, was 7 percent over this expected completion rate on downfield attempts in 2025, in the Jordan Love range (and ahead of Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson).
The Patriots acquiring Brown could mean, of course, that Mike Vrabel and the New England coaching staff is ready to go all in on a pass-heavy approach. It’s not as if the Patriots were balanced or run-first in 2025 though. They ranked fifth in pass rate over expected and sixth in neutral pass rate (when the game was within one score). Perhaps they’re in line to approach a Bengals-esque level of pass attempts in air yards. In that case Brown would have a clear path to top-3 wideout status assuming a healthy age-29 season.
Brown’s best-case scenario depends on him not having lost a step as he enters his eighth NFL season. Breer said this week that evaluations of Brown’s 2025 season are largely split among league observers who say he was disinterested in his final year with the Eagles, and those who saw a slightly less explosive receiver. The spreadsheets say AJB can still get open; only eight wideouts in 2025 had a better ESPN open score, which measures how much a pass catcher separates from surrounding defenders.
Fantasy drafters should not by any means write off Romeo Doubs as a distant WR2 in the Patriots offense. Doubs checked a few important metrics boxes during his time in Green Bay, and if the Pats are as pass-first as I think they might be, there will be enough targets for Doubs to have weekly intrigue in most 12-team formats. Hunter Henry, who was ninth in tight end routes and eighth in tight end targets last season, should remain a boring if startable tight end in deeper leagues.
Our long national nightmare is finally over. A.J. Brown to the Patriots! Great for Brown, great for Drake Maye and Devonta Smith 🚀. @rotoworld_fb pic.twitter.com/TL0mp8CR4a
— Matthew Berry (@MatthewBerryTMR) June 1, 2026
Eagles Fallout
AJB’s long-awaited departure from the Eagles leaves a hole in the passing offense that’s shaped like a 38 percent air yards share and a 27.5 percent target share. It’s rare for a team to lose such a chunk of air yards and targets from one player, though it’s not unprecedented (it happened in Tennessee when the Eagles stole Brown from the Titans).
A lot of these targets and air yards are going straight to Batman (DeVonta Smith), who last year took in almost 34 percent of the Eagles’ air yards and 23 percent of the targets. In the games Brown has missed since the start of the 2024 season, Smith has been treated as something close to a locked-in WR1 in the run-first Philly offense.
It goes beyond these top-level numbers, however. Smith’s profile, with Brown out of the Eagles lineup, went from solid-if-unspectacular WR2/3 to top-12 weekly option with upside.
- Smith was targeted on an unseemly 31 percent of his pass routes with AJB sidelined from Week 2 to Week 4 in 2024.
- Smith was Hurts’ first-read target at a 40 percent clip, an absurd number by any measure.
- Smith accounted for 59 percent of the Eagles’ air yards with Brown on the sideline. That’s Ja’Marr-without-Tee sort of stuff.
- Smith led the Eagles in both red zone targets and end zone targets over that span.
The Eagles took Makai Lemon in the 2026 NFL Draft knowing they would soon be out of the A.J. Brown business after two years of moaning and groaning and pretending to read books on the bench as a passive-aggressive protest against the team that treated him very unfairly. Lemon, along with Dallas Goedert, should be primary beneficiaries of an AJB-less Eagles offense that is expected to feature elements of the McVay-Shanahan system in 2026 under new OC Sean Mannion.
Goedert is particularly interesting in the barren wasteland that is the tight end position outside of the first couple options off the board. In the early 2024 games Brown missed, Goedert saw a target on 25 percent of his routes and averaged nearly three yards per route. Those are silly rates that you should remember if you pass on Brock Bowers and Trey McBride this summer and play the tight end waiting game.
