NFL Hack: QBs on Rookie Contracts

This may seem obvious to some, but in the NFL if you pay your most important player a lot less than the league average player gets at that position it will help other areas a lot. Wherever you stand on the NFL rookie wage scale, I am mostly a proponent, it is now clear it creates a byproduct in which some really good quarterbacks get paid nowhere near enough. Eventually this evens out a bit because it has allowed the best quarterbacks to make ridiculous amounts of money after their rookie contract expires. This byproduct creates the biggest advantage in professional football and possibly the biggest advantage in professional sports right now.

For reference, three of the four teams that made it to conference championship weekend had quarterbacks on rookie contracts.  The fourth team had a quarterback that was willing to take a massive pay cut. The result: four rosters that were absolutely stacked with talent.

Let’s take the team that won it all, the Philadelphia Eagles, as a case study. Last season Carson Wentz had just above a six-million-dollar cap hit. Now let’s suppose that after his rookie contract expires he signs somewhere in the range of $26 million cap hit average over the life of the deal. Now the Eagles need to start eliminating some of that money from the rest of their roster and the first to go for next season would likely be someone $7.6 million backup quarterback Nick Foles. We have seen this story before with the 2013 Seattle Seahawks. It is not impossible, but the only way for the Eagles or 2013 Seahawks to have maintained or continue maintaining a roster this good is by basically drafting perfectly. If history is any indication, that is actually impossible to do. This does not mean the Eagles are going to be terrible next year (the 2014 Seahawks nearly repeated and I expect the Eagles to be around that). What it does mean, is that in today’s NFL, and under this CBA, there will not dynasties. Some might say that is good for the sport; I personally don’t have much of an opinion on that debate.

There is much more of a deep dive on this topic that I am not smart enough nor qualified enough to go into. I can, however, generate some hot-takes for next NFL season based on this. Teams with rookie-contracted starting quarterbacks that either are good players, or we don’t know enough about yet heading into next season are: Cowboys, Eagles, Rams, Bears, Titans, Chiefs, and Texans. Now I am not saying these will be the teams that make it to the end because I don’t really even believe that. That said, if a few of those teams surprise people (save the Eagles since they can’t really surprise people next year) and make a deep run than I will most definitely take credit for it an say that I called it.