Etienne Busnel
The Quarterback position is considered to be one of, if not the most important position in all of team sports. The main decision maker on every offensive snap, it is incredibly difficult for a football team to even make the playoffs without a solid signal caller, let alone win a Super Bowl. As such, quarterbacks have long been the highest paid players in football, with the highest paid non-quarterback player in Aaron Donald only ranking 12th in salary. While quarterbacks getting paid is not a new phenomenon, the percentage of the salary cap star QBs have been paid has steadily increased over the past 5 years to the point that quarterbacks take up more of a team's budget than ever before. With these salary increases surpassing the rate of the salary cap increase, it asks the question of how the financial situation of paying a quarterback has changed over the past five years and how it reflects a changing NFL.
On May 3rd, 2018, Matt Ryan signed a record-breaking extension for 5 years $150 million. A year removed from an MVP season and Super Bowl appearance, Ryan’s contract was the first time an NFL player received a contract with $30 million average annual value (AAV) and $100 million guaranteed.
Just five years later this record would be shattered many times over, with Ryan’s deal dwarfed by contracts such as Patrick Mahomes’ 10 year $503 million extension and Deshaun Watson’s fully guaranteed 5 year $230 million contract. Even a quarterback like Daniel Jones, who is generally viewed as good but not elite, re-signed to a 4 year $160 million contract. These increased contracts illustrate the emphasis teams place on having a competent quarterback and that they are willing to dedicate a large percentage of their cap space to one.
The salary numbers show that today’s quarterbacks are paid significantly more than five years ago. The average annual salary for a starting quarterback not on a rookie deal in 2023 is about $36.5 million, compared to $22.2 million in 2018. This reflects a whopping 65% increase in quarterback salaries over 5 years, which even when accounting for the increasing salary cap is still a sizable 29% increase in how much quarterbacks are paid.
The cap hit numbers tell a different story however. When comparing the percentage of total cap space taken up by a quarterback’s contract, the number has not only failed to increase but actually decreased from an average of 12% in 2018 to 10% in 2023. The reason for this can be seen when comparing how much less of the cap the contract actually takes up compared to what its AAV would’ve taken up.
In 2018, only a few contracts significantly backloaded money to quarterbacks, with most contracts remaining fairly consistent and gradually increasing by a couple million dollars over their course. Only Miami and Atlanta structured their QB’s contract to free over 5% of available cap space, and the 49ers even chose to frontload the contract they gave to Garoppolo. By 2023 however, almost two-thirds of teams without a rookie QB had cleared 5% of their total cap space through the structure of their quarterback’s contract, with many clearing over 10%, or over $22 million. As such, the average cap hit of a quarterback has actually decreased from 12% to 10% of the total cap.
Despite teams now increasingly pushing money into the future, it does not seem that this has financially hurt them yet, at least for quarterback contracts. The only team to have not structured their QB contract to make less money than their AAV is the Titans, who may be entering a rebuild and as such do not need the short-term cap space as badly as other teams. Whether or not teams can effectively push money forward forever will need to be monitored, as these levels of restructuring to clear cap space only became commonplace league-wide recently. Practices such as void years and converting salary to signing bonus have allowed for more cap space to be cleared in the short-term without completely mortgaging a team’s future. This has allowed NFL teams to hand out larger contracts to QBs without worrying about the failure to field a competitive team around them.
The rise of utilizing rookie contracts for Quarterbacks may also be another reason for why teams push so much of their QB salary into the future. Teams have increasingly built around a rookie quarterback by utilizing their cheap contract to surround them with talent, with the last five Super Bowls having a team with a quarterback on a rookie contract (six if you count the Eagles with Wentz). The most recent examples of this were the Eagles with Jalen Hurts and the Bengals with Joe Burrow, two teams that may not have been able to support the surrounding talent needed to make the Super Bowl if they had been paying their QBs large contracts. More front offices have embraced this method of team building, with the number of projected starting quarterbacks on rookie deals increasing from 9 in 2018 to 14 in 2023. Teams paying veteran quarterbacks have thus adjusted to minimize the cap space their quarterback occupies so that they can also build a strong roster around them.
In conclusion, the increasing importance of having a competent player at the quarterback position has resulted in an overall increase in salaries for quarterbacks. With this overall increase in salaries, teams have adjusted how they team build in order to field competitive rosters around their quarterbacks. The two most common methods currently are building around a cheap quarterback on a rookie contract or restructuring their quarterback’s contract to push cap space into the future.
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