Three of the four teams in Sunday’s conference championship games benefit from the relatively low salaries of their signal callers.
By Matt Craig
Ask any team without a good one: the most valuable position in the National Football League — and maybe in all of sports — is the quarterback. Franchise fortunes rise and fall on the quality of their signal caller. For the handful of truly transcendent slingers, teams have proven there’s no price they won’t pay. That’s why the ເທິງ 10 of Forbes’ highest-paid NFL players are all quarterbacks.
Yet this year’s AFC and NFC Championship Games show that the only thing more valuable than an elite quarterback is an elite quarterback who’s inexpensive. Three of the four teams that will take the field on Sunday with a shot at the Super Bowl have starting quarterbacks earning a fraction of what NFL quarterbacks typically make: $3.9 million for Cincinnati’s Joe Burrow, $1.2 million for Philadelphia’s Jalen Hurts and $782,000 for San Francisco’s Brock Purdy. At $29.5 million, Patrick Mahomes of Kansas City is the outlier. He’s the only one of the four who’s earning more than $12.8 million, the league median for starting quarterbacks.
Relatively inexpensive starting quarterbacks making it this far are more the rule than they are statistical anomalies. Of the 23 quarterbacks to start in a conference championship game in the past ten years, 13 had contracts under $6 million. All but three of those were paid less than $3 million in the given season, and two made repeat appearances — Russell Wilson in 2013 and 2014, and Patrick Mahomes in 2018 and 2019.
AFC And NFC Championship Starting Quarterbacks
The trend began with the creation of a rookie wage scale in the 2011 collective bargaining agreement. That restricted the ability of draft picks to hold out and negotiate for higher salaries for the first four seasons of their career. Sam Bradford’s six-year, $78 million rookie mega-deal in 2010 was the last of its kind. The following year, top pick Cam Newton signed for four years and $22 million, with a team option that extended into year five. He led the Panthers to the Super Bowl. Even a decade later, Trevor Lawrence’s No. 1 overall deal was worth just four years, $36.8 million — $24 million in a signing bonus and only a couple million in base salary.
Quarterbacks who show promise early remain undervalued, allowing their teams to invest money into other positions. The salary a team saves on a young quarterback can be redirected, for instance, to the hosses who protect him on the offensive line. This year, for example, relative to their cheap quarterbacks, the Bengals, 49ers and Eagles all have total payrolls over $200 million.
“It should be no surprise that three of four remaining playoff teams have young QBs,” says Tim Derdenger, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. “A QB doesn’t win [playoff] games, a complete team does.”
That doesn’t mean quarterbacks aren’t worth the fortunes they eventually earn. The past decade was dominated by the likes of Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers and now Mahomes, who will make his fifth consecutive AFC Championship appearance on Sunday — two of them on a cheap rookie deal.
Paying Mahomes means less money for the rest of the roster. The Chiefs had to say goodbye this season to key players from previous championship teams, including Tyreek Hill, Tyrann Mathieu and Melvin Ingram. The burden will only increase next year when Mahomes begins the first season of his 10-year, $450 million contract extension.
Meanwhile, a downturn in performance can transform a big quarterback contract into an anchor that drags a team to the bottom of the division standings. Last fall, the Broncos signed Russell Wilson to a five-year, $245 million contract, only to see him throw the fewest touchdowns of his career. The Broncos finished the season with a 5-12 record, good for last place in the AFC West.
In these circumstances, the four-year rookie contract can often feel like a quarterback’s only chance to prove himself. Teams are more likely than ever to cut ties with even highly drafted young quarterbacks and try their luck with future draft classes. The Jets make their usual dismal example. The team drafted a quarterback in the second round in 2013 (Geno Smith), then again in the second round in 2016 (Christian Hackenberg), and top-three picks in 2018 (Sam Darnold at No. 3) and 2021 (Zach Wilson at No. 2). Only Wilson remains with the team, and for how much longer is anyone’s guess.
Sometimes these picks provide a nice return on investment, as was the case with Burrow, a former No. 1 overall pick. Other times teams get more than could’ve ever imagined. Mahomes and Hurts were both drafted as backups to established and highly paid starters, and Purdy came into this season as the third QB on the 49ers’ depth chart after being the absolute last pick in the draft.
Their teams have all found success, and now they’ll have to face another reality: cheap quarterbacks don’t stay cheap long.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattcraig/2023/01/29/the-only-thing-better-than-an-elite-quarterback-is-an-elite-quarterback-whos-inexpensive/