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The #Eagles and Jalen Hurts agreed to terms on a 5-year, $255M contract extension that makes him the highest-paid player in NFL history, sources tell me and @TomPelissero.

I’ve been saying this for a while but somehow the NFL is going to have to give teams some type of exemption for one contract to mitigate the impact of huge salaries. It would probably be used for QBs, but could be used for any player each year for Cap relief.
The owners probably won’t want to do that but they risk losing popular players and maybe some support if those players leave for more pay. That’s what it looks like to me.

It currently puts more emphasis on drafting young QBs as their first contracts are so much cheaper.

NorthHawk wrote:I’ve been saying this for a while but somehow the NFL is going to have to give teams some type of exemption for one contract to mitigate the impact of huge salaries. It would probably be used for QBs, but could be used for any player each year for Cap relief.
The owners probably won’t want to do that but they risk losing popular players and maybe some support if those players leave for more pay. That’s what it looks like to me.

It currently puts more emphasis on drafting young QBs as their first contracts are so much cheaper.

Rather than an exemption, I'd rather see them put some sort of percentage cap on salaries, no more than X% of payroll to any given player. You give them an exemption and it's essentially raising the salary cap by 15% or whatever. Besides, I get a little tired of blowing so much smoke up these quarterback's hind ends.

Either that or just leave it alone. Let the market correct itself.

Other than perhaps running backs it seems every skill position is out of control wage wise . It’s why I like the approach of Seattle and a few other teams that are going second shelf with solid QBs instead of paying the blackmail . Rodgers whose situation is influenced by Wilson’s travails and his own mouth may be where the worm starts turning as the lowly Jets are saying wait a minute here . As for Hurts give him his due . When I watched him look terrible in the Natty for Bama I never dreamed he would be starting at the position in the pros . His style will get him hurt , already has and it will get worse . And he’s one guy that can’t change. Then where is Philly ?

So yeah all this dough is a crazy train .

RiverDog wrote:
Rather than an exemption, I'd rather see them put some sort of percentage cap on salaries, no more than X% of payroll to any given player. You give them an exemption and it's essentially raising the salary cap by 15% or whatever. Besides, I get a little tired of blowing so much smoke up these quarterback's hind ends.

Either that or just leave it alone. Let the market correct itself.

Yeah, I honestly think the market will begin to correct itself. Look at what is happening with Lamar Jackson. The path to success might just be to keep drafting young QB's keep them for 4-7 years and then get a new one.

For me, it’s not the $$$ inasmuch as it is about the % of the cap…. Which I think has been aptly pointed out above. Round ball players & baseball players have the potential to make much more annually. The crème de La crème NFL players make their owners a LOT of $ and put their future health in greater peril…. I don’t care how much they make, so long as it doesn’t eff the rest of the team. We learned the hard way that it surely can.

The formula for winning can’t be to pay Hurts this huge a percentage of the cap. It’ll be ok for a year or two and then they’ll be stuck in cap hell with an oft injured QB. If Rogers flames out in NY, we will start to see a change. Already, as alluded to above, the Wilson and Watson deals are serving as what not to do scenarios.

Crazy money. Not even fun to watch a team with a QB taking all the money while everyone else splits up the rest. Bad model in my opinion.

Which is why if you have some type of exemption, the QB (or other player like, say Aaron Donald in his highest Cap hit year) could give the team some Cap relief.
The fans keep their passion and the team keeps a valued player.
Either that, or really bump up the Cap by something outrageous amount, but that would just increase all salaries and the owners wouldn't want that.

NorthHawk wrote:Which is why if you have some type of exemption, the QB (or other player like, say Aaron Donald in his highest Cap hit year) could give the team some Cap relief.
The fans keep their passion and the team keeps a valued player.
Either that, or really bump up the Cap by something outrageous amount, but that would just increase all salaries and the owners wouldn't want that.

I like the NBA's soft cap/luxury tax that allows teams to keep their exceptional players while sending the luxury tax to more fiscally responsible teams thus disincentivizing overspending monsters like the Yankees (at least like the Yankees used to be when I was still paying attention to baseball).

NorthHawk wrote:Which is why if you have some type of exemption, the QB (or other player like, say Aaron Donald in his highest Cap hit year) could give the team some Cap relief.
The fans keep their passion and the team keeps a valued player.
Either that, or really bump up the Cap by something outrageous amount, but that would just increase all salaries and the owners wouldn't want that.

c_hawkbob wrote:I like the NBA's soft cap/luxury tax that allows teams to keep their exceptional players while sending the luxury tax to more fiscally responsible teams thus disincentivizing overspending monsters like the Yankees (at least like the Yankees used to be when I was still paying attention to baseball).

I like Cbob's proposal better as it seems more equitable to the have-not's. Giving a team an exemption for a player seems like it would encourage the rich teams to overpay an individual and bypass the salary cap, which was put in place to maintain competitiveness.

But honestly, what's wrong with paying a quarterback 25% of the team's cap? If the Eagles think that their ticket to success is paying their quarterback an un Godly salary, then let them do it. Believe me, if enough teams with the Aaron Rodgers and Russell Wilsons start missing the playoffs, they'll quit paying them the big bucks. It will police itself. And I don't buy the argument that losing a free agent because their team can't afford his price tag is going to cause fans to lose interest in their team.

This year, the GS Warriors will pay more in "Luxury Tax" then about 1/2 the other teams total payrolls.
On the other side of the NBA coin, no matter how much the games actually generates in income, some owners only care about the $$$ that's going into their pockets at the end of the day and you'll never have equity. Baseball is the worst, by far.

The NFL hard cap is the only way to keep the teams at least somewhat competitive level. Unless the owners want to give up more of their profit (right now I think it's 50/50 or close) this is not going to change.

There is a minimum $$$ that all teams must pay out in salary.

jshawaii22 wrote:This year, the GS Warriors will pay more in "Luxury Tax" then about 1/2 the other teams total payrolls.
On the other side of the NBA coin, no matter how much the games actually generates in income, some owners only care about the $$$ that's going into their pockets at the end of the day and you'll never have equity. Baseball is the worst, by far.

The NFL hard cap is the only way to keep the teams at least somewhat competitive level. Unless the owners want to give up more of their profit (right now I think it's 50/50 or close) this is not going to change.

There is a minimum $$$ that all teams must pay out in salary.

IMO there isn't that many owners that fit into the category of caring more about making money than they do about winning. Besides, a successful team is going to sell a lot more paraphernalia and local advertising than an unsuccessful one. And like you said, there is a salary floor to keep that from happening.

Mike Brown used to be accused of being in that category of owner that was a tight wad that cared more about making money than he did about fielding a competitive team. But he's been pretty successful lately.

The other problem with the luxury tax is what happens in Baseball where an owner buys a team then to feed his ego he buys the best players and wins a championship then trades away all of the players.
It's always the same teams in baseball that are vying for the championship - the ones with the most money and maybe an outlier who decides to spend big for a year or two. That doesn't help the league at all and it turns some fans off.
Parity is the reason the NFL is so popular. Every team has a chance to build a team with the same amount of money and the best combinations of GMs and Coaches win out.

NorthHawk wrote:Parity is the reason the NFL is so popular. Every team has a chance to build a team with the same amount of money and the best combinations of GMs and Coaches win out.

Parity is definitely one of the major reasons, but not the only one. Baseball has 162 games in their regular season, so any one game isn't that big of a deal. But in football, one out of 17 games means so much more. Plus, it's the anticipation throughout the week, like a mystery of sorts, that piques a fan's interest. And football has been very successful at keeping their sport in some sort of limelight year round. No other sport has as much attention on their draft as football does. The scouting combine, free agency period, even the schedule release is timed so as to stretch out events and keep the sport relevant year round.

But to your point, ie parity, is one of the reasons why I'm against giving an exemption to teams for one player as it gives the team with a franchise QB a competitive advantage.

It doesn't have to be a QB. It can be a DE like, SF could use it on a new contract for Bosa because they don't have an expensive QB. The Rams could use it for Aaron Donald, and the Titans for Jeffery Simmonds.
It would probably be used mostly for QBs, but the point is it doesn't have to, and it can change from year to year.
Current example is the Eagles, the report for Hurts new contract of $255M are Cap hits of (from PFT) 'Via Schefter, the numbers are: $6.15 million in 2023; $13.56 million in 2024; $21.77 million in 2025; and $31.77 million in 2026'.
So they could use that exemption on any player other than Hurts until it hits hard in 2026 and they could keep some of their other stars as their contracts come up for renewal.
And it doesn't have to be a full exemption. It could be a percentage like 33% or maybe 50%.
As far as helping teams keep their star QB's? The competitive advantage is finding one, and if you have one, you don't give him up unless there is some conflict of personalities or goals.

NorthHawk wrote:It doesn't have to be a QB. It can be a DE like, SF could use it on a new contract for Bosa because they don't have an expensive QB. The Rams could use it for Aaron Donald, and the Titans for Jeffery Simmonds.
It would probably be used mostly for QBs, but the point is it doesn't have to, and it can change from year to year.
Current example is the Eagles, the report for Hurts new contract of $255M are Cap hits of (from PFT) 'Via Schefter, the numbers are: $6.15 million in 2023; $13.56 million in 2024; $21.77 million in 2025; and $31.77 million in 2026'.
So they could use that exemption on any player other than Hurts until it hits hard in 2026 and they could keep some of their other stars as their contracts come up for renewal.
And it doesn't have to be a full exemption. It could be a percentage like 33% or maybe 50%.
As far as helping teams keep their star QB's? The competitive advantage is finding one, and if you have one, you don't give him up unless there is some conflict of personalities or goals.

Even so, I simply don't buy the reasoning. I don't think the sport in general is going to be harmed by one player on a few teams hogging the payroll.

After a few teams, and the Broncos might be one of those teams, gets burned by giving a player an albatross of a contract, it will discourage others from doing so.

NorthHawk wrote:Which is why if you have some type of exemption, the QB (or other player like, say Aaron Donald in his highest Cap hit year) could give the team some Cap relief.
The fans keep their passion and the team keeps a valued player.
Either that, or really bump up the Cap by something outrageous amount, but that would just increase all salaries and the owners wouldn't want that.

Yeah bumping up the cap would be a very short term solution. I think that the market has to correct itself. Teams who have been successful in the salary cap era have done a good job of playing with the salary cap and not paying a guy too much money. If a team wants cap relief they have to manage it. Football is the best sport in the world and a huge part of that is the hard cap. I say don't mess with it. Teams must adjust and the market will correct itself. When it comes to Jalen Hurts I imagine his cap numbers actually aren't terrible for the next 3-4 years at least. That means that the Eagles will have had him for 7-8 years before his salary becomes an issue. They should start to think about what they are going to do when he leaves.

Current example is the Eagles, the report for Hurts new contract of $255M are Cap hits of (from PFT) 'Via Schefter, the numbers are: $6.15 million in 2023; $13.56 million in 2024; $21.77 million in 2025; and $31.77 million in 2026'.

That is $ 75 million over 5 years. So that's obviously not including any of the 'signing bonus' etc. That has to be divided over the length of the contract to get the true cap hit. I saw on NFL that he's the highest paid QB now at $51 million / yr. Or what am I missing?

Those were the preliminary figures for Hurts' contract. I suspect when it's all been picked over, the actual numbers will be quite different.
I chose that comment from PFT to illustrate that it didn't have to be used exclusively on a QB as his Cap hits early are quite low in this example.

jshawaii22 wrote:That is $ 75 million over 5 years. So that's obviously not including any of the 'signing bonus' etc. That has to be divided over the length of the contract to get the true cap hit. I saw on NFL that he's the highest paid QB now at $51 million / yr. Or what am I missing?

I haven't seen the cap breakdowns yet so I don't know if those numbers are accurate for sure but one thing that helps the Eagles is that he is still on his rookie contract. He was only due to make 4 million this year so a 5 year $255 million contract at $51 mil/year is really a 6 year $261 contract or $43 mil/year. It's still a ton of money and will eventually become a big cap hit but it allows them some flexibility with their cap hits.

1. No QB will go to a SB if their Salaries are over 40 million a year. 2. I just dont see the Owners guaranteeing money over long term for non qb players, they just cant. 3.I was a big fan of the cap when it came out, now I am not.

obiken wrote:1. No QB will go to a SB if their Salaries are over 40 million a year. 2. I just dont see the Owners guaranteeing money over long term for non qb players, they just cant. 3.I was a big fan of the cap when it came out, now I am not.

Well, #1 is wrong. Patrick Mahomes not only went to the Super Bowl last season, he won the darn thing, and starting in 2022, he's making $45M a season.