Prior to the 2022 NFL season, The Inscriber ran an article pointing out that this season several teams were spending unprecedented percentages of salary cap on their starting quarterback. We questioned this, given that no team has ever won the Super Bowl while spending more than 13.1% of its annual salary cap allowance on its starting quarterback (Steve Young in 1994). Moreover, only one team made it to the Super Bowl and lost while spending as much as 15.3% of its cap allowance (Matt Ryan, 2016). It turns out that we were optimists, as overspending teams are now wallowing in buyer’s remorse. Deshaun Watson, Russell Wilson, Aaron Rodgers Carson Wentz, Jared Goff
Two teams are paying their quarterback above the Matty Ryan limit for 2022 (Ryan Tannehill of the Titans at 18.5% and Patrick Mahomes of the Chiefs at 17.2%). These are the actual cap charges for the 2022 season, as opposed to promises for future years. 2023 and beyond are even more loopy but there is still an opportunity for clever (or desperate) General Managers to work a trade or restructure the contract to postpone disaster for a year or two.
Based on the past record, the Super Bowl winner usually has a quarterback that is not charging a huge amount of money to the salary cap in the year that they win it all. For example, the Rams were only charged $20 million for Matthew Stafford in 2021 when they won the Super Bowl. They promptly restructured his deal so that this season their charge is only $13.5 million this season. However, his cap charge goes up to $49.5 million in 2023, and that might start to get real. Rams fans and Browns fans may have quite a bit in common.
Fans may have the impression that Patrick Mahomes had a huge cap charge while making it to two Super Bowls and winning one, but this is not so. 2022 is the first year that Patrick Mahomes is generating a huge cap charge. Although he signed a massive extension in 2020, he continued to draw his salary from his rookie contract, while cashing a huge bonus check that was spread out over the length of his contract extension (NOT his rookie contract). His 2021 cap charge was only $7.4 million. So, his brilliant successes were achieved while he was earning a relatively small paycheck. Mahomes is so far earning his paycheck (more precisely, the salary cap charge of $35.8 million) as his Chiefs are currently 5-2.
Kirk Cousins and the Vikings ($31.4 million cap charge for 2022) are off to a 5-1 start with no other team in the NFL North better than 3-4. Cousins is on the play-now, pay later plan, with $12.5 million scheduled to be paid out after his contract expires. Thus, the Vikes are paying Cousins $40 million a year for two years, but the contract is spread out over four years. The Steelers did this with Ben Roethlisberger, so the 2022 cap is being charged $10.3 million dollars even though he is retired.
It’s like you want a fancy sports car but can’t afford the payment, so the salesperson tells you to take out a two-year lease, but extend the payments for three years, so you will have to turn the car in after two years but still make payments for an additional year. Meantime, you are going to have to buy some other economy car to replace the sports car and pay for that. Does that sales pitch make sense to anyone? Or, worse yet, does anyone actually plan to get divorced in advance and pay alimony? Yet NFL teams are planning on all this in advance and believe that they won’t mind when the time comes. Moreover, they think they are sane, and it is sportswriters and fans that don’t know enough to understand why it is a good idea.
Perhaps if that fancy sports car or that hot first wife got you a Super Bowl ring, it might be worth it. But has been pointed out by this writer and several others, no team has ever been able to construct a Super-Bowl-winning roster while carrying a salary cap charge for the quarterback above 13.1% of its cap allowance. And only one team carried a QB cap charge higher than Matty Ryan’s 15.3% and became a Super Bowl loser.
Any player with a uniform number has a shot to make the Super Bowl, so let’s not say that it is impossible to win the Super Bowl with an overpaid quarterback, particularly if that overpaid quarterback is named Mahomes. However, it has never been done before. 28-years in a row is not a fluke. That is a trend.
So why hasn’t it been done? Perhaps this trend is understandable because if your team is spending that much money on a quarterback, they have to be neglecting some other positions. That is going to weaken the team by the time they reach the post-season. If the Chiefs had, say, $20 million dollars of cap space they could utilize on the 2022 squad, they could address at least three or four other positions in a meaningful way. So yes, it is possible that Mahomes or maybe Tannehill or Cousins might be the first quarterback to break through the Steve Young barrier this season. But it is more likely that someone like Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson, or Joe Burrow gets there instead and keeps the 28-year-old streak alive. Those players are going to have a better paid supporting cast.
Although this season’s cap charge is the ultimate criterion to judge teams’ quarterback sanity by, there are other teams that appear to have made enormous commitments to the future. You can never be certain that a team won’t find a way to restructure the contract or make a trade to get off the hook. But as of now, it appears that teams like the Arizona Cardinals, Cleveland Browns, Denver Broncos have made extremely large commitments for the future.
Let’s start with Arizona, which intends to pay Kyler Murray $230 million for five years, starting in 2024. However, Murray’s cap hit is quite reasonable for 2022 and 2023 ($12.7 and $16.0 million respectively). In 2025, his cap hit jumps to $51.9 million. Jason Fitzgerald of Overthecap, the cap allowance might grow to $268 million by 2024 (see https://overthecap.com/nfl-and-nflpa-look-forward-to-the-future-salary-cap). If so, Murray’s cap number would be 19.0%. That is much higher than Steve Young’s figure in 1994, the first year the cap was initiated. Murray is a good quarterback, but come on, Young was a Hall of Famer. This is simply too much to pay for a quarterback and the team is not likely to prosper
But we’re just getting warmed up. The Broncos were so eager to obtain the services of Russell Wilson that they traded two first round picks and two second round picks, plus three decent players (tight end Noah Fant, defensive end Shelby Harris and quarterback Drew Lock). The Broncos also received a fourth round pick and gave up a fifth round pick, which is an upgrade but not a net gain in the number of picks. The net is that four picks and three players went to Seattle, and Denver extended Wilson’s contract for five years (committing him for a total of seven years into the future) and $245 million. How much are the additional picks worth? A mid-first round pick will draw $16 million for four years, and a mid-second round pick will draw about $7 million. Thus, Denver gave up about $46 million worth of draft capital on top of their $245 million investment in Wilson, so they have invested roughly $290 million in this wonderful quarterback. Plus Fant, Harris and Lock add value as well, pushing the total investment north of $300 million. Needless to say, Arizona did not give up any draft picks for their quarterback, but the Broncos went nuts.
No doubt, John Elway believes they are guaranteed to win Super Bowl after Super Bowl with this bargain superstar, right? How could nerdy sportswriters possibly doubt his genius? It is a mystery, but we will keep our jobs longer than he keeps his due this foolhardy investment.
Of course, the Cleveland Browns set the bar at a new level with their $230 million, four-year deal for Deshaun Watson, the greatest artificial turf, dome quarterback of our generation. However, no one in the Browns front office thought to remind Jimmy Haslam III that his stadium is natural turf and open air. Darn! The devil is always in the details. It is not even necessary to try to psychoanalyze the personal problems that Watson has had, which has received ample coverage in the mainstream press. Let’s just stick to football and point out that he is the most expensive quarterback with two ACL surgeries in NFL history.
But no matter, Watson is apparently worth three first round draft picks and three later round picks on top of all that cash. The draft capital ($16 million for a first round pick; $4 million for late round picks) adds another $60 million or so to Watson’s price tag, or $290 million for four years. So, figure that the Browns have committed about $72 million per season in total resources to obtain Watson as their quarterback. In the 1980s, the Browns dueled the Broncos three times for the AFC Championship. If John Elway and Andrew Berry really know what they are doing, then we should see this matchup again for the rest of this decade. Does anyone believe that Wilson versus Watson will become a classic playoff confrontation?
These football geniuses should probably listen to us nerds with the calculators and spreadsheets. When we are punching the numbers in, the answers are not making any sense whatsoever. The so-called experts are saying that Wilson and Watson are “Franchise Quarterbacks” and worth obtaining at any price. They are wrong.
Other quarterbacks with questionable contracts include Matty Ryan, he of the infamous 15.3% contract and the blown Super Bowl loss to the Patriots (gee, if they could have settled on 13.0%, perhaps one extra upgrade could have made the difference in a Super Bowl that went into overtime!). The Falcons decided to bite the bullet and took a $40.5 million cap hit for 2022 when they traded him to Indianapolis. The Colts, having learned nothing from the Falcons’ debacle, stand to blow $36.7 million on him over the next two seasons that they cannot get out of. They will pay and pay for a quarterback who now a backup. Just because they paid huge amounts of money does not mean he is automatically a “Franchise Quarterback,” whatever that is. Everybody thinks that they know who the Franchise Quarterbacks are before the start of the season, but truthfully, you only know when the season is over. Anyway, Matty Ryan isn’t one.
Things could get very interesting in Green Bay if Aaron Rodgers cannot reverse his slide. The Packers would have to take a $98.6 million cap hit if they trade him this offseason. They can spread it over two seasons by trading him after June 1, but they still have to absorb the hit somehow. They should have taken the draft picks that Denver was looking to deal, but of course the fan base would have killed them for it. Well, be careful what you wish for. The Packers will be forced to pay for Rodgers for years to come. The Packers, their fans and Rodgers probably deserve each other.
Similarly, Matt Stafford has a very comfortable cap number of $13.5 million this season. Not bad for a 34-year-old with a tendency towards elbow problems. However, if they decide they want to cut Stafford next season, it will cost them $75.5 million against the cap. His cap charge increases to $49.5 million in 2024. They just have to pay him whether they want to or not. They really cannot afford to cut him until 2026, when he will be 38 years old. They will simply have to pay and pay and pay and pay Matthew Stafford whether they want to or not.
Table 1 updates the quarterback salaries around the league as well as the team odds for winning the Super Bowl. The key features are that among the megabucks quarterbacks, Kirk Cousins and Patrick Mahomes are uptrending, while others are trending downwards. If they make the playoffs, they have some shot at overcoming the Steve Young barrier of 13.1% current-year cap charges. However, the odds probably favor lower priced quarterbacks, namely Josh Allen and Jalen Hurts.
Table 1. 2022 Quarterback Cap Hits as a Function of Team Salary Cap Allowance (sources: Overthecap.com; Vegasinsider.com, also see Ref 2).
2022 will go down in history as the year when “Quarterback Fever” was at its maximum. NFL General Managers chose to invest hundreds of millions of dollars on quarterbacks who were good but not great. In the case of Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson, Matt Ryan and Matt Stafford, there seems to be an implicit assumption that because Tom Brady has played at a high level into his mid-forties that everyone else should be able to do the same thing. Well, in 100 years of playing football, Brady is the only one who has done it, so you should not get your hopes up based on one data point. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.
Owners, if your general manager is wanting to pay a quarterback over 13% of the salary cap allowance, or pay them for years after their contract expires, you should probably call one of us internet sportswriters and have a look at our spreadsheets. We may not know as much about football, but we can give you a dispassionate analysis and tell you when the numbers are not making sense. Right now, there are several teams who have been dissatisfied with their quarterback situation, and they convinced themselves that spending extraordinary and unprecedented sums of money on undesirable quarterbacks would solve the problem. This is pathological thinking. Frankly, after blowing a quarter of a billion dollars, this is a very serious situation. This how teams can go 1-16 or 0-17 or even risk losing their stadium leases. It is that serious and we have the numbers to prove it.
Table 1. Super Bowl Quarterback Salaries Since 2011 (source: Spotrac.com).
Table 2. 2022 Quarterback Cap Hits as a Function of Team Salary Cap Allowance (sources: Spotrac.com; Vegasinsder.com, Wynnbet.com).
Reference.
- Adam Thompson, NFL QB Contract Trends: What is the Optimal Cap Hit to Win a Super Bowl? Link: https://bookies.com/nfl/picks/nfl-qb-contract-trends-what-is-the-optimal-cap-hit-to-win-a-super-bowl.
2. Super Bowl 57 Odds: Track The 2023 Favorites with Bills & Bucs Leading (sportsbettingdime.com)