NFL salary cap: Separate cap for QBs make sense?

The NFL owners are used to one thing, and they do it very well: make money.

And not just with their respective teams. The majority of owners are billionaires for a reason. They are adept at what they do in the business world and have made their fortunes before they became involved in the ownership of their respective club.

One thing billionaires don’t like to do is lose money. On anything. Ever wondered why every major sports league has some sort of farm system as a feeder structure except the NFL? The reason is, they have done that twice before, and lost a ton of revenue on both.

From 1965-1969 the league sponsored the “Continental Football League” which had teams in cities such as Orlando, Toronto, Richmond, Hartford, Omaha, Akron, and Charleston, to name a few. Several NFL clubs would share rosters with one Continental squad for development. The league folded because attendance was horrible and each team was losing money rapidly. So, the NFL shut it down before it could lose any more funds.

Pat Palinkas, the first woman to play on a men’s pro football roster, was the placement holder for the Orlando Panthers franchise.

The “World League of American Football”, later renamed “World League”, “NFL Europe” and finally “NFL Europa”, was another developmental league funded by the NFL from 1989 to 2007. Teams also shared squads in this league, mainly sending the lower third of every NFL roster for development. This league was losing $30 million a year, so its closing was not surprising.

The NFL has always had college football as its breeding ground, which does not cost anything. The league has a good working relationship with this sport in that they don’t schedule games that conflict with the college game.

Salaries are at an all-time high in the NFL. This league pays the most to play pro football.

Note: figures are per season

National Football League minimum: $795,000

2024 team salary cap: $255.4 million per club

Canadian Football League minimum: $70,000

2024 team salary cap: $5.525 million per club

United Football League minimum: $55,000

2024 team salary cap: league-owned clubs

Arena Football League minimum: $27,500

2024 team salary cap: $700,000

Indoor Football League minimum: $7,875

National Arena League minimum: $4,000

With a 53-man roster plus a 16-member practice squad (17 if there is an international player), that’s a huge expense for every NFL club’s ledger page.

But what blows everything out of the water are the contracts the quarterbacks are getting. $55 million a year? To play football? For essentially 17 weeks?

The league has a hard salary cap for teams to address their overall salary costs. This places every franchise on the same plateau as far as employing players, eliminating the threat that a few teams will end up with all the best talent, and then dominating.

If one position, such as quarterback, escalates into the stratosphere, why can’t the league enact a quarterback threshold? Every year the rates for this one position just skyrocket.

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Is that possible? Would the owners consider something as radical as this? Where would the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) stand with this idea?

Following the news of the Jacksonville Jaguars and QB Trevor Lawrence agreeing to a new five-year, $275 million contract extension, isn’t it about time this conversation gets started?

To be exact, the owners have already begun this conversation.

Beginnings

To some, when the Cleveland Browns traded for Deshaun Watson and gave the quarterback a five-year $230 contract, some believed this was the beginning of this trend. The exodus was that Watson’s deal was fully guaranteed.

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There had been guaranteed contracts left and right, beginning with Kurt Cousins’ three-year deal worth $84 million which was fully guaranteed. That shocked the purse strings of every NFL owner because it was the first to be fully guaranteed plus at the time was the highest-paying agreement in the history of the league.

But the contract that broke the internet was in 2020.

Patrick Mahomes had been the 10^th overall pick in the 2017 NFL draft by the Kansas City Chiefs. At the time, the Chiefs already had a former first-overall selection in Alex Smith as their signal-caller who was playing very well. So, the Mahomes pick was a bit of a surprise venture.

Mahomes signed his four-year rookie deal for $16.42 million with a signing bonus of $10.08 million. By 2019, Smith was gone and Kansas City had won their first Super Bowl in 50 years. Mahomes was playing spectacularly and was named the game’s MVP. He was later ranked fourth by players in the league on the “NFL Top 100 Players of 2020” list. All arrows to Mahomes’ career were pointing up.

In the following off-season, the Chiefs picked up his fifth-year option and then signed Mahomes to a 10-year extension – for $477 million with bonuses that could escalate the deal to $503 million.

With the scribble of that one ink pen, the NFL salary structure for quarterbacks had been changed forever. For better or worse, till death do they part.

Can you blame the player? Is this the doings of Mahomes, Watson, or Cousins? No. Players hit the field and let their accomplishments do the talking. Most careers don’t go into double digits in terms of years so they have to cash in when they can. Agents work for their players because their reputation and commission depend upon it.

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Owners pay the contracts. Owners agree to the terms of the agreements. Owners decide whether to pay the player and keep him, or let somebody else find a way to pave his streets with gold.

Nobody had ever heard of a fully guaranteed contract until Minnesota Vikings owner Zygi Wilf penned Cousins to one.

Now that Lawrence has reset the market and was signed to another gigantic deal, the time seems to be ripe to have the conversation to place a ceiling on what is perceived as the game’s most valuable position.

Owners hit the brakes once before

There is a conversation going on about the league placing a moratorium on spending regarding the quarterback position. Sort of, a quarterback cap if you will. Right now, this is in the “what if” stage.

This is similar to what occurred in 2010 with the rookies.

Every year, rookie players were getting paid substantially more than established veterans who had been working their craft for years and even had Pro Bowl hardware. Then suddenly a newly drafted rookie would be making a third more without even playing a single down in the league.

This obviously had repercussions on most NFL rosters. More and more seasoned players were holding out each summer demanding a new deal because the new kid was making more. The vets were ticked that their efforts towards the franchise were being overlooked when the coaching staff suddenly saw something shiny and overpaid for it.

The preponderating regarding this issue occurred when QB Sam Bradford was drafted first overall by the St. Louis Rams in the 2010 NFL draft, and then penned a massive six-year $78 million contract that contained $50 million in guarantees and had a maximum value of $86 million.

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Bradford had been a superstar at the college level – and every NFL club wants a superstar under center for their roster. It began for Bradford as a freshman as he was named the 2007 Freshman of the Year. By the time he graduated, he had won the Heisman Trophy, named First Team All-American, First Team All-Academic, and took home just about every offensive award offered. The Associated Press named him their College Football Player of the Year.

He seemed to be a lock for a great pro career when the Rams took him first overall in the draft. His trainee deal was the largest rookie contract in the history of the league and instantly placed him in the Top-20 of salaries, which pissed off a lot of people.

The owners had been mulling over a rookie cap that would allow the league to maintain some level of normal financial expectations when 22-year-olds enter the pro football universe.

Bradford’s deal was the last one under the old system which allowed sports agents to basically hold NFL owners hostage with their first and second-round draft picks. In those days, it was common for a guy taken sixth overall in the first round to be paid less than another player who was chosen later in the same round because of tactics imposed by certain agents.

The owners and the NFLPA failed to reach a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) before the 2011 NFL draft.

At the forefront of these negotiations, the salary cap was the most prominent item on the agenda. However, in the backdrop was the attempt to get the rookie salaries under control.

At the time, many NFL clubs would routinely trade away their first-round draft picks to avoid the financial burden of players who were expecting bank. The very act of trading down into a lesser round enabled clubs that were cash-conscious to avoid paying rookies excessive salaries and at the same time gather extra draft picks. In the long run, a lot of those additional picks proved to have better monetary value in association to their on-field performances.

The NFLPA was in favor of instituting a rookie wage scale. The reasoning behind this was to help the veteran players despite diluting a rookie’s ability to get more money upfront.

This became a well-designed plan. Implemented into the 2011 CBA, the new rookie wage scale ensured that veteran players would make as much money as they possibly could. And to this day, that is precisely what is happening.

Rookies who have never stepped on an NFL field no longer can make $50 million guaranteed from the get-go. Now their goal is that second contract. Isn’t that the way it should be?

The players who now receive the bigger deals are the ones who have put in the necessary time to get where they are today: the veterans.

It used to be that a high-priced rookie taken in the first round made up 4.3% of a team’s overall cap number. Then suddenly, that number dropped to 1.6%. The rookie wage scale has brought uniformity and consistency to rookie salaries. It also brought back the importance of keeping a team’s first-round pick instead of ditching it. Now, every player inks a four-year contract, and going into negotiations everyone already knows what the dollar amount is. Plus, when was the last time you saw a rookie holdout before training camp? That has almost vanished because there is very little to hold out for. Language in the contract?

Regarding what the rookie wage scale has done for the game, Joel Corry of the National Football Post stated:

“The escalation of rookie salaries from one draft class to the next has been minimal since the rookie wage scale was implemented because increases are tied to the growth of the cap. There is a freeze on signing bonuses for draft picks because the growth in minimum salary outpaces the growth of the cap.”

In the 2011 draft, another quarterback was again the first player selected by the Carolina Panthers: Cam Newton, the Heisman Trophy winner from Auburn. He signed a four-year deal for $22 million.

Owners hit the brakes – again?

With that experience behind them, the owners know a new system can be installed, and they know how to achieve it.

Each new quarterback extension pushes the bar beyond the one before it. Could this be the time to implement a “quarterback cap”? Could Lawrence’s deal become the Sam Bradford example of the last one that went through?

Tom Pelissero of NFL Network said:

“There certainly has been discussion within the league, among certain owners, about even the idea of a quarterback cap, that at some point, you want quarterback numbers to not go over a certain percentage of your salary cap. To my knowledge, that really hasn’t gained traction, in part because so many teams have paid their quarterbacks.”

Which is a very true statement. Most teams have already swung a huge deal with their starting quarterbacks. So, why the suggestion to make cost controls happen for the most important position on the field?

And the quarterback market, like the NFL salary cap, has only one place to go, and that is up. You know the old saying: You are worth what someone is willing to pay you.

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Right now, a high-dollar signal-caller can absorb as much as 25% of the team’s salary cap. The theory would be for NFL clubs to have a salary cap for their entire roster, and a separate salary cap just for their franchise quarterback.

Does it seem ludicrous that a single playing position in a team sport should require its own salary cap? Then again, why reward clubs for overpaying their quarterbacks?

One thing for certain, NFL owners are all about managing costs. And player salaries are at the top of every financial ledger.

Currently, a quarterback cap is not part of the CBA. This is where this must begin to be implemented just like the rookie wage scale. It would have to become an amendment to the existing agreement if the owners wanted to push it to become part of their financial structure. If not, all parties would have to wait until the new CBA is ratified in the year 2030.

Another stumbling block could become the argument that if quarterbacks are under separate control, what would stop the league from eventually making this happen with other positions? Pass-rushing edge rushers and blindside offensive tackles come to mind.

An amendment to the CBA would certainly have to be passed, and of course with the NFLPA’s blessing. What incentive would they have to allow this to proceed? It is suppressing part of their membership without any value to anybody except the NFL owners themselves.

The NFLPA has worked tirelessly for decades to keep player salaries up, not locked.

Without an amendment, the NFL could not move forward. They can’t do this in-house among themselves because that would be viewed as collusion, which is a huge no-no. Would the owners wait another six years and attempt to throw this matter onto the pile when the 2031 CBA becomes their new agreement? Or do the owners want this now?

A quarterback cap sounds like a great idea on the surface. But getting it to the reality stage is a different matter.