Just two summers ago, Jared Goff and Carson Wentz were the faces of their franchises, freshly anointed with two of the largest contract extensions in NFL history. The Rams and Eagles announced to the world, with their wallets, that Goff and Wentz were their guys. Franchise quarterbacks. Cornerstones of their respective futures.
But when the 2021 league year dawns on March 17, neither Goff nor Wentz will be a part of the teams that gave them those deals. Goff will be traded to the Lions and Wentz to the Colts, each shuttled out of town before the first years of those extensions even kicked in.
So desperate, in fact, were their original teams to get rid of these guys that they'll incur significant salary-cap hardships to do so. The Rams will carry a dead-money charge of $22.2 million on their cap this year as a result of Goff's contract. That amount would be the highest single-player dead-money charge in NFL history ... if not for the $33.8 million dead-money charge the Eagles have to carry for Wentz.
What does it all mean? Did the Rams and the Eagles make huge, costly mistakes by giving Goff and Wentz their deals when they did? If other teams believe they did, will that hinder the ability of quarterbacks such as Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen and Baker Mayfield to get their extensions this summer? Or Kyler Murray next summer? And if not, will this now become the norm -- ditching your franchise quarterback mid-contract and paying a massive financial penalty in order to do so? What has changed all of sudden in the NFL that makes previously inconceivable dead-money charges palatable?
The answers, as you might expect, are complex and depend to some extent on whom you ask. I spoke with several team executives, player agents and salary-cap experts over the past few days to get a sense of where people think this all might lead, and I came up with a few takeaways:
Quarterbacks, coaches and GMs are under more pressure than ever
"It used to be you had four or five years to figure it out with first-round quarterbacks," one agent told me. "Now, it's three."
Part of this is the fifth-year option, a device installed in the 2011 collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that allows teams to exercise a fifth year in addition to the standard four-year rookie contract on first-round picks. Teams are required to decide after Year 3 whether they will exercise the option, which comes at a significantly higher price than the player's salaries from Years 1-4 and thus marks the end of the window during which their starting quarterback is a bargain that makes it easier to build around him.
Wentz and Goff each got their extensions after their third years, in part because their teams wanted cost certainty beyond Years 4 and 5. They would have both made $22.8 million in 2020 if the options had remained intact, and they would have been free agents or franchise-tag candidates this year had the extensions not been done.
Another part of the Goff and Wentz situations, though, is that disappointing 2020 seasons convinced their teams they had to move on. The Rams decided they'd gone as far as they were going to go with Goff, and after Wentz made it clear he didn't want to be in Philadelphia anymore, the Eagles were happy to oblige him. Several of the people to whom I spoke for this story said they thought quarterbacks used to get more time to recover from bad years in the pre-social media era, citing the early struggles of players like Eli Manning as an example.
Fundamentally, what the cases of Goff and Wentz show us is that teams don't want to compound mistakes by extending them. Yes, the Rams and Eagles will suffer massive dead-money hits in 2021, but those deals won't impact their salary caps at all in 2022 and beyond. Had they still been on the team for those years, they would have cost huge money. And had things not improved, that would have resulted in years' worth of trouble instead of one really bad short-term hit.
"It says what some people have always known about the NFL -- that it's cash that matters, not cap," a team executive told me. "A team owner is more likely to take the point of view of, 'With how much I'm paying in cash, what else can I get for that cash?' People just aren't being bound by old constraints."
This applies in the case of Goff, who will be officially traded once the league year starts for Matthew Stafford, who's actually scheduled to earn less over the next two years than Goff will. The Rams consider Stafford an upgrade for whom it was worth paying the trade price and the dead-money price. The Eagles' case is a bit different, because they didn't get a quarterback in return for Wentz and instead will have to turn to a relatively untested Jalen Hurts or a draft option. But the concept remains the same. They won't have to pay Wentz the $25.4 million they were scheduled to pay him this year, or the $22 million they were scheduled to pay him next year. In exchange for the dead-money hit, they get $47.4 million they can spend on other stuff.
"The only way you can pull it off is if you have a progressive GM who's thinking 'two steps back for three steps forward,'" one longtime salary-cap expert said. "Yeah, you take the hit now, but within 18 months you have all of your cap relevancy back. You also need a progressive owner who understands how the money works."
First-round quarterbacks don't cost as much as they used to
When Sam Bradford was the first overall pick in the 2010 draft, his rookie contract with the Rams was for six years and $78 million, including an $18 million signing bonus and $50 million guaranteed. Joe Burrow, the first overall pick in the 2020 draft, got a four-year, fully guaranteed contract worth $36.2 million with a $23.9 million signing bonus. And the Bengals hold a fifth-year option on him for 2024 and can franchise-tag him after that. This is a direct result of the 2011 CBA.
"When guys like Eli and Sam Bradford were coming into the league, the contracts were so huge, [teams] had to give them all that time," an agent said. "Now, if [a team is] sitting there after Year 3 and the guy's no good and you're at the point of that fifth-year option, you don't have nearly as much sunk into him."
This doesn't apply in the cases of Wentz and Goff, who were traded during their second contracts and not their rookie deals. But 2018 first-rounder Josh Rosen was traded after the first year of his rookie deal, and his draft classmate Sam Darnold could be on the move this offseason. The rookie wage scale and the slotting of draft-pick contracts has delivered what the owners hoped it would -- greater financial flexibility with first-round rookie deals than they used to get.
The 2011 CBA also brought teams the ability to roll over cap room from one year to the next, which offers even more flexibility and helps teams deal with the financial ramifications of cutting the cord early on a big deal gone bad.
The very good quarterbacks are still probably going to get extensions after Year 3
Sure, you wouldn't want to be the Rams or the Eagles right now, having extended your quarterback as early as the rules allowed you to while he was still on his rookie deal and regretting it just two years later. But the flip side is ... the Bears.
Chicago drafted Mitchell Trubisky with the second overall pick in 2017, which meant his fifth-year option would have been for this year and the organization had to decide last May whether to exercise it. They did not, which means he's a free agent and the Bears have no quarterback.
Now, you could argue that Trubisky is no great loss, based on his performance so far, and that being on the hook for $25 million or so for him for 2021 would have been a bad thing for the Bears. The problem is, teams need a quarterback, and the Bears didn't get any of the three established guys (Goff, Wentz or Stafford) who've already been traded this offseason.
At the moment, the Texans insist they aren't trading Deshaun Watson. So if the Bears -- or another team that needs a quarterback -- can't get him, their options on the free-agent market are Andy Dalton, Jameis Winston, Alex Smith and Ryan Fitzpatrick. Or they could try to trade for Darnold or Marcus Mariota. Or they could go with Nick Foles, who's still on their roster.
If you want to argue that any or all of those guys are better options than Trubisky, that's fine. But are they better by enough to justify the uncertainty the Bears currently have at the position? They could theoretically decide Trubisky is their best option and bring him back. But it would have to be on a new free-agent deal that likely would cost them more than the option would have. And even if they did have him on the option, they might have been able to negotiate a Blake Bortles-style bargain extension that brought down this year's number in exchange for some minimal 2022 money.
All of that led one team executive to tell me: "You'd better believe Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen and probably Baker Mayfield's teams are going to pay them, because what's the alternative? The worst thing isn't not liking your quarterback. It's not knowing who your quarterback is."
The mistake the Rams and the Eagles made wasn't necessarily doing the contracts when they did them, it was in their evaluation of the players. Los Angeles figured Goff would continue to progress, and he didn't. The Eagles surely never imagined Wentz would regress to the extent that he did. Player evaluations go wrong all the time. No one can predict the future. But when you're considering extending your quarterback, that's not the only factor.
Part of the reason it made sense for the Rams and Eagles to do the Goff and Wentz deals in the summer of 2019 was that they looked ahead and saw that Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson likely would be negotiating their extensions in the summer of 2020, which they did. Mahomes' deal averages $45 million a year and Watson's just under $40 million a year. Waiting a year could realistically have inflated the floor for Goff's and Wentz's deals by as much as $7 million or $8 million. The Rams and the Eagles guessed correctly on the market, just not on the players.
This year? Heck, the Ravens, Bills and Browns could look ahead and see that only Kyler Murray among the draft class of 2019 looks like a sure bet to be talking big QB extension next summer, and maybe they decide that means they can wait and get another year's worth of evaluation. But the Ravens, Bills and Browns also must contend with a wrinkle in the new CBA. Starting with the Jackson/Allen/Mayfield draft class of 2018, fifth-year options for first-round picks are fully guaranteed at the time they're executed. (As opposed to only being injury guaranteed as they were in years past.) Those teams will have to decide on some level of commitment to their starting quarterbacks this offseason, whether it's one more year or five.
The players aren't just pawns in all of this
The Goff and Wentz contracts, because of their size and the significance of the dead-money hits they would incur if cut or traded, offered those players some level of power in their situations. Wentz in particular, since he was the one who let it be known he didn't want to be in Philadelphia anymore and ended up going to his preferred team with his preferred coach.
The Bears weren't going to trade valuable draft picks for a guy they knew wanted to play for a different team. The field on Wentz was narrow, in part because he's coming off a bad season, in part because everybody knew where he wanted to go, but also in part because his contract pays him $47.4 million (including $40.4 million fully guaranteed) over the next two seasons. Once you sign a deal like that, assuming your agent has structured it the right way, you have the ability to exert some leverage over your situation.
"The quarterback is not just the highest-paid player, he's the highest-paid person in the organization," an agent said. "Certainly that should put you in a position of some leverage to dictate what goes on around you."
Look, for instance, at the case of Dak Prescott, a fourth-round pick from the Goff/Wentz draft class who was a massive bargain for the Cowboys prior to 2020, when he played on a $31.4 million franchise tag. Had Dallas been able to get a deal done with Prescott two offseasons ago, his contract probably would have looked something like Goff's and Wentz's -- at least in terms of average annual salary at around $32 million. Last year, maybe it would have cost them about $35 million a year. This year? If Prescott is asking for anything less than $42 million a year, he's doing Dallas a huge favor.
The system has worked in Prescott's favor because he was willing to wait out the Cowboys, pile up endorsement money and run the risk of going year to year on lucrative franchise-tag salaries. In his case, since he wasn't a first-round pick, there was no fifth-year option, which heightened his leverage even further after Years 3 and 4. Even if he does sign a long-term deal this offseason, it'll be better than what Wentz and Goff got two years ago, when, like them, Prescott was extension-eligible for the first time. There's a lesson in that for Lamar Jackson. If the Ravens don't offer what he thinks he's worth, he need only look to Prescott's example to answer the question, "What power do I have in this situation?" With the way the quarterback market in the NFL is shifting, and movement is more present and conceivable than ever, the answer is, "More than people used to think you did."
In conclusion: These aren't just blips on the radar
The Goff and Wentz trades indicate a significant change in the way the NFL conducts business as it pertains to its high-priced franchise-quarterback types. And the fact that they happened means deals like these will continue to happen. The Texans might find themselves trading Watson, who signed his mega-extension last year and has made it clear he doesn't want to play there anymore.
It is, as we so often hear, a copycat league. Teams that never could have imagined taking on $22 million or $33 million in dead money for a single player have now watched teams do exactly that. If the Rams or the Eagles make it back to the Super Bowl in the next couple of years -- heck, even if they come close -- other teams are going to look at these situations and decide they're just fine.