Mid-range quarterback values are rapidly on the rise, with players like Kyler Murray being paid nearly $50 million a year– how’d this happen?
Late Monday night, Daniel Jones inked a 4-year, $160 million deal to stay with the Giants. $40 million a year for a quarterback that has won one playoff game in his career. Daniel Jones fan or not, the number seems absurd, especially when considering Jones’ original contract as the 6th overall pick would’ve skimmed $18 million per year off his contract. In just five years, the NFL quarterback market has exploded to new heights, a bubble that doesn’t seem on the verge of popping anytime soon.
With plenty of factors to blame, it’s become clear the NFL has changed since only a few seasons ago with QB values skyrocketing into the stratosphere in what seems like a vacuum with no signs of stopping.
Rewind a decade, and we see this class of middle-tier, franchise quarterback but yet to be a superstar type not be paid even close to the value that the same demographic is demanding now. Back then, the main contenders were Mark Sanchez, Jay Cutler, and Tony Romo– all of which had to negotiate with a much lower salary cap, spread out value, and the reluctance of teams to ink quarterbacks to long term deals.
Nowadays, Lamar Jackson is asking for a country’s GDP in guaranteed money, all for a player who missed serious time over the past two seasons. Agree or not, it’s clear-cut, the market is on an upward trend… and it all started with the middle-tier QBs.
The salary cap has steadily increased year-to-year with the exception of COVID’s 2020 season, a rare outlier in an otherwise rapidly growing league. The outcome; more money being able to spend on players. This same phenomenon can be seen in the wide receiver market as well where Christian Kirk got paid a bank vault by Jacksonville– 4 years for $72 million.
Teams have started to put more and more emphasis on quarterbacks throughout the past couple of years. Two teams in recent memory went all in for an immediate gain signing two big name quarterbacks in order to hoist a Lombardi– the Buccaneers and the Rams, both of whom paid big time money to Tom Brady and Matthew Stafford respectively.
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Daniel Jones won’t win any MVPs, but he’s a critical component to a team which proved this year they can do well with Jones under center. Jones is a prime example of how the game value of quarterbacks has increased; in a sport that has grown to accustom the passing side more than anything else, the usefulness of a solid quarterback has grown. Thus, why teams are much more willing to pay big money in order to keep a pass-thrower around rather than looking for cheaper alternatives.
Teams have now started to understand that while quarterbacks may be cheaper and more enticing, training them is the hard part. Especially coming from college, schemes are different, quarterbacks are more raw, and it’s a shot in the dark whether they’ll be a boom or bust. The Jets experienced this first hand with Zach Wilson– all signs pointed to him being a decent QB coming out of BYU only for him to be one of the biggest draft failures in New York history.
Sure you can do all sorts of film study, bring a kid in for one-on-one interviews, but none of that matters until they get on the field. For a quarterback, nearly everything is different. Game speed is much faster than in the NCAA, reads are different, schemes get more exotic– a good quarterback has proven to be good through a trial by fire, so he’s worth keeping around.
The value of a QB has also been ballooned and backstopped by the fact that other positions have seen a loss in valuation just as a matter of how the game has evolved. Positions like running backs and defensive lineman have seen their pay slashed, due to the stray away from a run-focused offensive sport to more of an aerial attack. The combination of the two have propelled quarterbacks like Kyler Murray, Lamar Jackson, and Derek Carr– mid-tier players at the position to demand $30-40 million a year.
The New York Jets have seem prepared to give higher status players like Aaron Rodgers a carte blanche, essentially ready to pay him whatever he desires with owner Woody Johnson saying the team was “all in” on Rodgers. The exodus of players leaving the lower pay scales and the movement into a pay bubble will propel higher-value quarterbacks into the range of $60-70 million a year.
As players like Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovailoa, and Justin Herbert start coming up on terminal ends of their contracts they will most certainly wave their fingers at these middle-class contracts of Geno Smith, Derek Carr, and Daniel Jones as a starting point and use these values to blast them into unprecedented ranges.
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Quarterbacks these days are taking up more and more of the cap as teams start to place them higher on their priority chart. It’s nearly impossible to find a playoff-worthy signal caller demanding less than 20% of a team’s overall cap space. Pair along an elite receiver and all of a sudden, 30-50% of your cap is gone to two offensive weapons.
As QB salaries have gotten higher, a lot of other positions have been left behind. NFL clubs have shown that they are willing to cut off some important pieces in order to succumb to a quarterback’s demands. In 2022, the Chiefs let go of Tyreek Hill and Melvin Ingram in order to pay rising legend Patrick Mahomes, a move that paid off with a Super Bowl win.
The Broncos attempted to do the same thing by bringing a fresh face in, foregoing a slew of draft picks and their starting tight end in exchange for Russell Wilson. While the move may not have worked out in his inaugural season in Denver, the premise remains the same– the Broncos were willing to give up big bucks for one of the game’s elite QBs.
Forbes made an interesting point, relating the NFL QB market to a universal one.
“It’s hopefully a reminder of a simple truth that in any market economy, a rising price logically signals a falling price elsewhere,” Forbes’ John Tamny wrote. “That is so because our resources as individual consumers aren’t unlimited. Tradeoffs once again. The NFL is no different. Though spending per team is as previously mentioned capped, even NFL teams face tradeoffs. And as the value of the quarterback position grows and grows, this reality is felt through reduced valuation of other positions. Rising prices aren’t necessarily “inflationary” as the tradeoffs made by NFL teams and individual consumers hopefully indicates.”
This sort of market bulge is unique to the past decade. All throughout the game’s history, quarterbacks rarely demanded the type of kings’ ransom they do now. As aforementioned, the rapid rise of the spread-RPO system which prioritizes passing (as one NCAA coach put it, “an RPO is a built-in pass play on every run play) as well as the growth of the NFL’s salary cap has only occurred in the past 6-7 years.
It was rare to see a man under center take up more than 10-15% of a team’s overall cap space, with running backs being hot commodities under the helm of Jamaal Charles, DeMarco Murray, Chris Johnson, and Adrian Peterson. As teams deduced that backs were replaceable with a short usable lifespan, they died out– along with their inherent monetary value.
While naysayers are quick to point out Ravens brass’ reluctance to pay Lamar Jackson the big bucks, instead opting to hand him a non-exclusive franchise tag– it’s important to remember Lamar’s underlying issues. Shoddy QB play, questions about long-term longevity, and a huge swath of money guaranteed that must be put in escrow has been a major turn-off for Baltimore. This is in spite of the team building the roster around Lamar’s strengths originally, which proves the point of valuing a quarterback highly.
Either way, whether Jackson gets paid– the QB market is growing, fast. In a couple years, the base salaries of even the average quarterbacks is bound to increase to a level which is hard to fathom.
