The painfully normal appeal of Ann Michael Maye
- - The painfully normal appeal of Ann Michael Maye
Kelsey WeekmanFebruary 6, 2026 at 3:59 AM
0
The breakout star of this year’s football season isn’t one of the players. It’s a 22-year-old recent college graduate who posts videos of herself baking cinnamon rolls, showing off quirky needlepoint projects and packing for away games. She also happens to be married to New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye, who will be playing the Super Bowl on Sunday.
Ann Michael Maye – yes, she’s got one of those disarmingly charming Southern double first names – is now a bona fide influencer with around 500,000 followers each on TikTok and Instagram. The comments on her posts hail her as the “queen of the north,” despite her roots in North Carolina, and insist that Gisele Bündchen, the former wife of a former Patriots quarterback, would never show her supporters a day in her life or buy groceries at Stop and Shop. People support her with the fervor of fans cheering for an athlete... if her sport were run-of-the-mill domestic tasks.
There’s no doubt that WAGs – that is, the wives and girlfriends of professional athletes – are having a cultural moment. In recent years, their ranks have swelled with A-listers who are famous in their own right. There’s superstar Taylor Swift, now engaged to Kansas City Chiefs tight end, Travis Kelce; Hailee Steinfeld, married to Buffalo Bills quarterback, Josh Allen; and Olivia Culpo, married to San Francisco 49ers running back, Christian McCaffrey. Then, there’s a whole other tier of WAGs who were largely unknown when they began dating or married elite athletes, but aren’t shy about capitalizing on the fame and visibility that goes hand-in-hand with those relationships. In the age of social media (and lucrative brand deals), that’s just good sense.
View this post on Instagram
It's also true that the whole concept of a WAG feels inherently misogynistic. Taking a woman and reducing her to the fact that she romantically wrangled a physically impressive specimen is icky. It's particularly unsettling in a landscape where female athletes struggle to get the same support or traction. Nonetheless, I have to admit WAGs are mesmerizing to watch, and their proximity to fame is the reason we know they exist. So what makes Ann Michael so compelling?
She’s a craft-loving pilates enthusiast and recent college graduate thrust into this role because she married her middle school sweetheart
In a way, she’s antithetical to the WAGs we typically see – she’s not dripping in designer clothes or sporting 24-inch hair extensions. She wasn’t a celebrity whose established clout led to her introduction to her partner, like Gisele, Cardi B or Swift. She’s a craft-loving pilates enthusiast and recent college graduate thrust into this role because she married her middle school sweetheart, who has a $36.6 million contract. There’s something ridiculously wholesome about seeing someone become a star because they excelled in the position they were given.
The endlessly relatable girl next door
Ann Michael is an influencer, but she’s not quite a personality. We know what she’s making and wearing, but not what she’s thinking. She hosts the NBC Sports Boston show "Beyond Bakemas,” which spun off from a series she posted on social media. From lurking on her LinkedIn profile, we know she studied business administration at the University of North Carolina, interned with Deloitte Consulting and served as vice president of finance for her sorority. In high school, she was the captain of at least three different sports teams.
Drake Maye of the New England Patriots and his wife Ann Michael Maye. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images) (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
Her whole vibe is relatable, like your neighbor or sorority sister. Her chicken salad, for instance, whipped up while wearing a beige workout set, looks eminently achievable. It’s easy and utilitarian, probably something most home cooks have in their back pocket, and not particularly aesthetically pleasing. It’s as if her posts were engineered to be palatable to the widest possible audience, appealing to all manner of sports and lifestyle content fans, and safe for any brand to invest in. It’s refreshing that she doesn’t seem to be working all that hard at it. Who wouldn’t want to associate with the wicked smart and endlessly relatable girl next door?
I admit I was skeptical of Ann Michael at first – I root for WAGs to establish their own identity outside of doing tradwife-adjacent domestic tasks to sustain their partners’ athleticism. Commenters on Ann Michael’s page are constantly clamoring for her to take care of Drake: to feed him soup, to make him strong, to get him back on the field. She doesn’t really engage with that, and, from the outside, it genuinely seems like cooking, crafting and putting outfits together are her hobbies. So, more power to her for building a platform from those passions, no matter how basic they seem.
She’s the anti-WAG
That’s another way she contrasts with other WAGs like Brittany Mahomes, the wife of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. Always flawlessly manicured with a fresh blonde blowout, she is widely despised for her reputation as a wife who’s too loud, too involved in his gameplay and too emotional in general. Is she annoying? Perhaps. Is that her right? Absolutely. Something about beauty paired with outspokenness tends to set people off.
I don’t think Ann Michael is actively trying to stand apart from WAGs like Mahomes, but she does. She doesn’t have the brash personality that made Kylie Kelce, wife to former Philadelphia Eagles player Jason Kelce, a podcasting superstar. She does share the casual, understated beauty that endeared people to her, however, rebuking the standard of unattainable perfection set for many WAGs.
It helps that Drake, when asked about Ann Michael, can’t resist hyping her up, cheekily asserting that she’s a bigger star than him. Notably, this contrasts with Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who has been keeping his mysterious new wife’s identity a secret, inadvertently sparking a search for her akin to that of the hunt for the Zodiac Killer. Ann Michael may not talk much about herself, but she’s not hidden away either. She indulges Patriots fans’ curiosity to know more about who’s baking their quarterback cookies. Not too much, though.
View this post on Instagram
So why is she so interesting? Because she isn’t. She was seemingly made in a lab to be adored and inoffensive, in striking contrast to the inherently hateable nature of the Patriots. Side-by-side with her babyfaced husband, who unexpectedly brought a fallen dynasty back to glory, she’s impossible not to root for.
I’ve recently become obsessed with an Ann Michael fan account on Instagram, which has 75,000 followers. They often post absurd memes in support of her, likening her to Princess Diana, hyping up her latest baking videos and generally exalting her status above that of her husband. The co-owners of the account are still enjoying their anonymity, but they lauded her authenticity, sweetness and relatability.
View this post on Instagram
“She doesn’t always have every ingredient but she posts it anyway,” they told me via Instagram DM. “It’s amazing to see someone so genuine get her own audience outside of her husband’s for doing her own thing and being herself.”
Above all, Ann Michael’s content, as safe and domestic as it is, is charming because it’s boring. She might be cooking bean dip for a superstar athlete, but she’s doing it in a way that you can, too. It feels attainable. This life could be yours – you’ll just have to find a different person to share it with.
If you buy something through a link in this article, we may earn commission.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
