New York, NY – At the midpoint of the NFL season, perhaps the only surprise is that some of the league’s lowest-paid quarterbacks are outplaying their counterparts who are carrying much more expensive price tags. This has led analysts and executives to question if the league’s current system regarding quarterback pay needs an adjustment in terms of how teams are spending their salary cap dollars.
The last few seasons have witnessed some of the league’s top teams having a quarterback in his rookie deal or signed to relatively reasonable deals. At the other end, the teams that can splash $20 million per year on a quarterback are not yet still able to build competitive rosters around those expensive signings. It just all feels strange considering how much better some teams are than others; several people ask whether such money being flung at a single player is the most sensible use of that money.
The Kansas City Chiefs and the Buffalo Bills are prime examples of this strategy gone wrong. Each lost big on the quarterbacks while overcoming failures. They had to shed valuable players from their rosters to manage the cap. The Cincinnati Bengals, who had gone to the Super Bowl with young quarterback Joe Burrow, enjoyed the cap space to accumulate a potent supporting cast on a rookie deal.
But pay quarterbacks less? The answer isn’t that simple. The position is still the most important one on the field, and a true franchise quarterback can carry a team in ways that no other player can. The Los Angeles Chargers with Justin Herbert and the Jacksonville Jaguars with Trevor Lawrence may look sharp sitting on this side of the ledger-but teams have long fretted over being perhaps too deep into franchise quarterbacks who are just starting to get into the realities of contract negotiations.
This is also what some feel teams should do: draft and develop quarterbacks when they are cheap. As soon as those quarterbacks are eligible for big contracts, then teams could attempt a reset, moving on and drafting another signal-caller instead of signing him for a big portion of their cap.
Rather, it is through the more intelligent rostering construction and more creative use of cap space rather than the avoidance of having a high quarterback that takes most of that cap space. In this way, teams can front-load contracts or backload with incentives so that they cover their zones of underperformance.
As this argument rolls on, NFL teams are sure to tread these deep waters very carefully. And so, even if such low-paid quarterbacks present an interesting model, a Super Bowl will probably be won with rather more than a change of spending philosophy.
