How do NFL front offices approach big QB contracts? Are there tricks to managing the salary cap? And does team culture matter?
Dan Graziano is a senior NFL national reporter for ESPN, covering the entire league and breaking news. Dan also contributes to Get Up, NFL Live, SportsCenter, ESPN Radio, Sunday NFL Countdown and Fantasy Football Now. He is a New Jersey native who joined ESPN in 2011, and he is also the author of two published novels. You can follow Dan on Twitter via @DanGrazianoESPN.traded up in the first round to take Love. This set off a firestorm of criticism.
Teams find themselves in different quarterback situations. Do you have a QB who's still on his rookie deal, a veteran getting paid $50-plus million annually or something in the middle? Is your guy the long-term answer? Can you win with him? Will you winGM Jason Licht said."And if you know in the draft a quarterback is going to be lights-out -- like, you know he's going to be-- you'd offer literally 10 first-round picks for that guy. It wouldn't matter. It would be worth it.
"You draft a , and once you realize that's your guy, you should be asking, 'Can I win a championship with him?'"The NFL is a salary cap league, and even with the cap at a record-high $255.4 million for 2024, teams with big-money quarterbacks have to make tough decisions elsewhere on their rosters to accommodate that salary. Bills quarterback's cap number last season was $18.6 million. This year, it's $30.
"Once we're paying top dollar, we knew we were going to have to rely on players that were on rookie contracts to be Robins to the Batmen," Snead said.sprung up around those Super Bowl champion Rams. Snead and the organization leaned into it and had a whole bunch of fun with the perception that they were the ultimate forget-the-future, win-now team. But as is often the case, it was an oversimplification.
"The question is: Can you, in an unbiased way as an organization, identify what window you're in?" Snead said."Are you building? Have you broken through? Are you now in this contending window? If you're building, you certainly don't give up a second-round and a third-round pick for a player who might only be there a few months."They paid a premium for the 27-year-old, but Poles believes it's important to recognize when it's worth stretching for a player.
"Any team that has a QB on a veteran deal, you do have to look at ways where you can find relative value in other areas of roster construction," Browns GM Andrew Berry said.
Buccaneers GM Jason Licht kept the core of his Super Bowl-winning roster together to help coach Todd Bowles try to run it back but now has cap challenges as result. pays him a minimum $1.125 million base salary this season but has an option bonus for 2029 worth $38.875 million, which he will receiveto bring his total pay for 2024 to $40 million.
The NFL has a variety of ownership structures, and some teams are better equipped to dole out big signing bonuses than others due to the wealth of their owners. An antiquated rule that requires teams to keep the guaranteed money in their players' contracts in escrow makes it challenging for some franchises to hand out big guarantees.
As several of the GMs interviewed said, a big part of the culture piece of roster building requires honest self-assessment of your building's infrastructure. What kind of support staff does the team have? Who are the veterans on the roster who will have the strongest influence on the player? Who are the coaches?
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