We are entering the time of year in the Business of Football when many who are not conversant in the area veer into this lane. And for full-time nerds like myself, especially those with experience and expertise, it is frustrating—and sometimes amusing—to see misinformation and misplaced authority, which comes up as frequently as in any area with salary cap and player contracts.
Over the years in this space and others, I have tried to calmly and reasonably counter such misinformation. But there is one theory out there that continues to have some traction, one that makes me shake my head every time I see or am asked about it, one that comes even from pundits who have covered the NFL for years. It is this: NFL teams paying market contracts for top quarterbacks either cannot, or have a very hard time trying to build a Super Bowl–contending team.My unequivocal answer to this is: wrong!
I have been on radio programs in places like Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Baltimore and Los Angeles, where new megacontracts are expected for Jalen Hurts, Joe Burrow, Lamar Jackson and Justin Herbert, respectively. The hosts have the same question: My answer is as definitive as it can possibly be: yes!
Let me be even more clear: This idea is a cop-out, a tired excuse and bulls—. (Is that clear enough?)
Let’s examine.
CBA makes cap management simple
In the 30-year history of the NFL salary cap, it has never been easier to manage for several reasons:
1. The gift of rookie contracts
A primary reason for this is that the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) mandates that all drafted players must sign four-year contracts, and they cannot be renegotiated until the player has played at least three seasons in the NFL. This provision alone gives teams a tremendous head start on managing the cap.
NFL team rosters have varying numbers of players on rookie contracts, but my best estimate is between 50% and 65% of NFL rosters are players under their first NFL contract. Let’s say there are 30 such players on a team’s roster, and we’ll say that, conservatively, each player has a cap charge of $1 million. That is a cumulative cap charge of $30 million for more than half the team.
With the NFL team cap set at $224 million for 2023, that estimate would put every NFL team at $195 million in cap space to pay their 20–25 players not on rookie contracts. Paying a quarterback market value should not be a problem.
2. The rollover
And, even better for teams, the cap is not really $224 million. Also per the CBA, teams are now allowed to roll over unused cap space to create each team’s adjusted cap. Every team in the NFL rolled over some unused 2022 cap space into ’23, from the Browns’ rolling over $27.6 million all the way down to the Rams’ rolling over $400,000. The Browns—while paying one of the biggest contracts in NFL history to their quarterback—are working with far more than $224 million, with an adjusted cap of more than $250 million.
Thus, each team is working with more than the advertised $224 million, plus the advantages the rookie pay system has given them. Again, it is not hard to pay the team’s most important player a market contract with all of this cap room.
3. The minimum spend
I have written before about the CBA’s minimum spending requirements for teams. While there are deficiencies I have mentioned, including thresholds that are too low in percentage of spending (89% of cap) and time for calculation (over three years), there are thresholds nonetheless. Teams must spend, and with so many rookie contracts, there are obvious targets for where their spending will be: most obviously the quarterback.
Take a team like the Bears, sitting currently with almost $100 million of available cap space. They have virtually no top-of-market veteran contracts in their roster. Indeed, were their CBA minimum spending requirements judged annually rather than over three years, they would not meet the minimum this year. They will have to spend liberally in the next year (or couple of years) to meet the minimum thresholds; Chicago will, almost by necessity, have to give Justin Fields a megacontract next year, just to pay someone on their roster.
Should teams have to spend on someone, it might as well be their quarterback.
