The NFL Quarterback Market Is Shifting as Teams Balk at Paying Second-Tier Players

Either you have a franchise quarterback or you don’t, but what teams are doing about it may be changing.

The image that danced in the general manager’s head is one you might remember. It happened in the Sunday night window of Week 4 last season on a second-and-goal, with the Chiefs at the Buccaneers’ 2-yard line, the ball on the left hash and 11:35 left in the second quarter. Patrick Mahomes took the snap and rolled right; Tampa Bay DE Pat O’Connor came free to the right side of the Chiefs’ line and shot straight at Mahomes like he came out of a cannon.

Mahomes got depth and ran around O’Connor, diving at him, then sprinted to the right boundary with Tampa All-Pro Devin White closing in on him. The quarterback planted off his lead foot and spun back to the field, sending White into the grass before doubling back to the sideline to avoid Keanu Neal, and, now hard against the sideline, flipped the ball over a crowd of players from both teams and into the waiting hands of Clyde Edwards-Helaire for the score.

It was, undoubtedly, a signature moment in the quarterback’s second MVP season.

It was also where this GM’s mind wandered as he listened to a league official go on and on at last week’s annual meeting, telling the assembled GMs, coaches, execs and owners the Chiefs led the NFL in a certain injury-related category—and trying to correlate it to their championship run. As if that’s why Kansas City hoisted the Lombardi Trophy in mid-February.

“They got f---ing Patrick Mahomes,” the GM thought. “What the hell are we talking about?”

Teams that don’t have a franchise QB like Mahomes need to be creative in how they solve that problem :: Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports

It wasn’t, of course, out of any disrespect to the Chiefs or to an important NFL initiative.

It was, instead, part of a conversation I was having with him about how teams reward their quarterbacks and which ones are worth paying. And those moments, both the one in Florida in October and this one in Arizona last week, illustrate where we were going with all this—in both whom you reward and how laughable overcomplicating any of it is.

“Come on, dude,” he says, laughing. “It’s Patrick Mahomes. So, yeah, sure, when you got that guy. And I think Joe Burrow is that guy, too. I think [Justin] Herbert is that guy. Josh Allen, when you have that player, yes. He’s been in your building, you drafted him and you developed him, you know exactly what he is, yes. Bet the farm. Give him everything.”

But if you don’t?

That’s what we’re going to explore this week, diving into how the quarterback market has materially changed over the last couple of months, with the league’s highest-end players at the position subtly separating from the pack and the future of the middle-class signal-caller shifting in a pretty significant way.

As our GM says, if you’ve got Mahomes, you can more or less hand him a blank check. If you don’t, how you fill that position is far more complicated.

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It’s April, and that means our focus will soon be shifting to the draft. But before it does, we’ve got plenty to get to in this week’s MMQB column …

• We’re going to jump into the Thursday Night Football debate.

• We’ll update the Aaron Rodgers and Lamar Jackson situations.

• We’ll also get to how the Niners will handle their quarterbacks in the Takeaways.

And, of course, plenty more. But to start we’re bringing a lesson in quarterback economics and how the league’s taken a hard left turn in that area over the last couple of offseasons.

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Over Ron Rivera’s first three years in Washington, the team’s expenditures on quarterbacks were where you’d expect a team to be. In 2020, Alex Smith and Dwayne Haskins ate up $28.9 million in cap space. In ’21, Ryan Fitzpatrick and Taylor Heinicke accounted for a more modest $12.1 million, and then the number for Carson Wentz and Heinicke last year jumped back up to $31.7 million.

Coming out of 2022, Rivera, GM Martin Mayhew and personnel chief Marty Hurney asked an interesting question of themselves: Was all that money allocated effectively?

“There’s a lesson people learned,” Rivera says. “Look at what Philadelphia was able to do for a couple years. That’s one of the things we looked at. Look at Philadelphia. Look at Cincinnati. I mean, these are teams that are doing well with these quarterbacks, and they were on their rookie contracts. Look at what that means for them. They were able to field good teams, they got themselves in the playoffs and they were able to keep good players.”

What if, the logic followed, Washington gave a young guy it really liked, in Sam Howell, a legitimate shot, with legitimate runway to win and keep the job, and backstopped him with an affordable veteran? Would that be better than, say, getting Derek Carr or Jimmy Garoppolo at a premium?

The Commanders are about to find out; the Buccaneers and Falcons will, too. All three are doing it with intention, and that intention varies a bit from place to place. The foundation of it, though, for all three teams, is as Rivera laid it out: saving at quarterback to fix other things.

For Washington, it’s created the flexibility not just to take care of Daron Payne, but also sign center Nick Gates (three years, $16.5 million) and tackle Andrew Wylie (three years, $24 million) to shore up the line. It’s had a similar effect in Atlanta, with the Falcons paying to lock up Chris Lindstrom and Kaleb McGary on offense, and acquire Jessie Bates III (four years, $60 million), Kaden Elliss (three years, $21.5 million) and David Onyemata (three years, $35 million) for the defense. Meanwhile, Tampa will pay off a boatload of cap debt from the Tom Brady era, with plans to eat around $80 million in dead money to set up a much cleaner 2024.

And in the place of a Carr or Garoppolo or—had he gotten to the market—Daniel Jones, the Commanders paired Jacoby Brissett with Howell, the Falcons matched Heinicke with Desmond Ridder and the Bucs signed Baker Mayfield to compete with Kyle Trask. The three vets are 30, 27 and 30, and have combined for 142 NFL starts. And the teams saw a little something in the three young players—who’ll cost their teams a combined $3.7 million on the 2023 salary cap—last year that left them wanting to see more.

• For the Commanders, it was first what defensive players would tell their coaches when Howell was running the scout team, plus how the receivers would say he was throwing them open and using leverage against the defense. Then, when Wentz went on IR, and Howell became the backup, the staff got to see what he’d learned and how he’d self-correct. And then, finally, in the season finale against the Cowboys, all that those coaches had seen and heard came together to give way to the thought that Howell deserved a real shot. (There was also the fact that the Commanders had a second-/third-round grade on him in 2022, and that a couple of Washington scouts, before Howell dipped a little in his final college season, put 6.4 and 6.7 preseason grades—starter grades—on him.)

• For the Falcons, it was that the maturity they liked on Ridder predraft had manifested in just about every way while he served as Marcus Mariota’s backup through the first three months of the season. When they went to Ridder in December, it was 100% based on performance—Arthur Smith was adamant that it be that way. And after that, the steady improvement Ridder had made behind closed doors spilled on to the game field, with his passer rating improving in each of his four starts (59.3, 85.2, 90.1, 108.2).

There were smaller moments, too. The ball he put on Drake London to convert fourth-and-5 in a very up-and-down first start, in New Orleans, that London fumbled after a 12-yard gain (effectively ending that one). How he bounced back from fumbling a snap and taking a sack on his first two third downs in Baltimore the next week. And how, ultimately, he took the experience from those weeks and won his last two starts.

• For the Bucs, it was, really, what’s been untapped the last two years. Bruce Arians told people inside Tampa’s building how he loved Trask’s ability to be unaffected by things happening around him in the pocket, while also being completely aware of what’s happening down the field. Incoming OC Dave Canales said to his new colleagues that he loves what a catchable ball Trask throws and how easy he makes it on receivers. Everyone loves that both in Florida and even in high school, Trask has had to fight for every snap he’s taken.

There have been flashes, too, like in the preseason last year against the Dolphins, when all of that showed up, with Trask standing in with a push coming to his blind side and delivering a bucket throw right into Jerreth Sterns’s hands for a 19-yard touchdown.

So in each of these cases, there’s a young guy who really merits a look—Howell and Ridder will open spring as starters, Trask will get a chance to compete—and a capable vet. And, perhaps, a new trend for teams that aren’t lucky enough to have a Mahomes, a Burrow or an Allen (or, in Tampa’s case, lucky enough to have a Tom Brady anymore).

Pairing Heinicke with a player on a rookie deal is a lot cheaper than overpaying for a second-tier QB :: Rich Barnes/USA TODAY Sports

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One thing people with all these teams raised was pointed back to 2022, framing last offseason as a sort of breaking point for quarterback spending.

Indeed, six teams paid $40 million per year or more on new contracts for single players at the position: the Broncos (Russell Wilson), Browns (Deshaun Watson), Cardinals (Kyler Murray), Packers (Aaron Rodgers), Raiders (Carr) and Rams (Matthew Stafford).

“Who got what they paid for?” asks one exec.

To his point, not one of those six teams made the playoffs. Two fired coaches, one (Las Vegas) has already offloaded its quarterback and another (Green Bay) is in the process of doing so—with both those teams setting up to be more economical at the position, if in different ways, with quarterbacks their coaches have background with.

In a way, this will effectively end the trend of contract leapfrog—at the same position that started it in 2016, when Andrew Luck reset the quarterback market. Luck was leapfrogged by Carr, who was leapfrogged by Stafford, who was leapfrogged by Garoppolo, who was leapfrogged by Kirk Cousins, who was leapfrogged by Matt Ryan, who was leapfrogged by Rodgers, who was matched by Jared Goff and Wentz, who were then leapfrogged by Wilson (whose previous contract was the one Luck leapfrogged). And so on and so on.

The bottom line is, it got to the point where the highest-paid player in the NFL was simply the most recent starting quarterback to get paid. That changed a little last offseason, with some variance in how stars were paid (there was a gap, for instance, in where Rodgers and Wilson were, and where Carr and Stafford landed), but there was still massive cash going out to quarterbacks who were outside the top 10 at the position.

Now, with teams like Atlanta, Washington and Tampa Bay, it seems like there’s a broader rethinking of the entire thing afoot, and one that’s actually got its parallels in another sport.

“You can compare it to basketball,” says one NFC exec. “You saw it happen with max deals in the NBA—at one point, 25 teams had players on max deals. But really there were only about eight of those, guys like Giannis [Antetokounmpo], KD [Kevin Durant], Steph [Curry], that were truly those guys. At a certain point, teams realized, I don’t have to give John Wall or Mike Conley the max. I think it’s the same dynamic with the quarterbacks.

“I don’t think anyone thought Kyler was better than Mahomes when he got paid. But nature is to jump a guy to the top tier, regardless of whether he’s actually one of the top guys. You’re seeing pushback against that now.”

Of course, it’s hard, if you have stability at the position—even if it’s not in the form of a top-five player—to walk away from it or even turn down the chance to get competent at the position with an option from the outside. But that fear of not having one is a big part of what drove the market wild in the first place.

“It’s like, if you have Derek [Carr] or Dak [Prescott] or Kirk [Cousins], it makes you feel really good, and I get that,” says one AFC exec. “Then the game starts, and you might be like, Man, this guy is limited. But there’s that fear, and that fear is real.”

To further our NFC exec’s analogy, I then equated, to this exec, having one to being a 45-win NBA team, close enough to the big prize to make you feel good yet running the risk that you might not ever get there.

“I think you nailed it—these teams that are signing players that are limited to these contracts, guys that need a lot of help to make you a contender, are the ones getting into trouble,” he says. “In a lot of those cases, you’re probably better off seeing if you can find lighting in a bottle with a cheaper player or players.”

Which is what we’re starting to see.

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The Super Bowl provided perhaps the best example of where this is going.

The Chiefs had nine of their 10 draft picks among the 46 players active for their three playoff games (with four of those rookies starting) and still made it back to the big stage the season after offloading Tyreek Hill, in large part because they have Mahomes. Philadelphia, meanwhile, had Jalen Hurts on a second-round, rookie contract surrounded by a loaded roster, filled both with paid, homegrown talent and playmakers acquired from the outside (including A.J. Brown, who was traded to Philly weeks after Kansas City traded Hill away).

“You had Philly, loaded-up, stacked-up team, quarterback on a rookie deal,” says one NFC GM. “And then you had Kansas City, and they got to the point where they had to let some guys walk, they let Tyreek walk, and they have a quarterback that can carry the team, where it’s worth it to pay him whatever it is. So you’ve either got that or a quarterback on a rookie contract that you believe you can win with.”

That last word—with—is key, too.

The Chiefs can do more than that with Mahomes. They can win because of their quarterback. And so decisions they have to make almost work in reverse to what Atlanta and Washington are doing: They have to rely on rookies. This offseason, they let Juan Thornhill, Orlando Brown Jr., JuJu Smith-Schuster, Khalen Saunders and Wylie himself go and, while they did get one big, free-agent fish (Jawaan Taylor), they mostly signed equivalents of Heinicke at other positions, players like Mike Edwards and Drue Tranquill.

The Eagles, meanwhile, now face the prospect of having to reward Hurts and move from one category of NFL team to another. It presents everyone in Philly with an interesting challenge, especially after the last such challenge the team undertook (with Wentz) failed.

Even more interesting? The idea that teams can live, and thrive, in between those two categories is vanishing.

Because as Week 4 in Tampa showed, either you have a guy like Mahomes … or you don’t.