BY JAY HART
Just before 11 a.m. ET Monday, Lamar Jackson dropped a bomb on the NFL world. He revealed that he’d requested a trade from the Ravens more than three weeks ago.
But as the drama escalates in Baltimore, the bigger question remains: What will the ultimate end of the Ravens vs. Lamar saga mean for the NFL?
Here’s an educated guess:
Fully guaranteed contracts will soon become the norm. Lamar Jackson may not be the one who breaks the dam that’s already sprung a leak, thanks to the Cleveland Browns. But before too long, an owner worried about losing his franchise QB is going to relent and pony up another huge guaranteed contract.
That is going to usher in a whole new economic world in the NFL, one even wilder than what’s happening now. And GMs are going to be forced to figure it out.
This is where it could get interesting.
Conventional wisdom in the NFL is to draft a quarterback high, build the team around him as if you’ve got the QB position figured out, then pay him in Year 5 or 6.
But what if it wasn’t? What if teams started drafting a quarterback every year?
It’s one thing to hitch your financial wagon to Patrick Mahomes. But like the Deshaun Watson contract, Mahomes is an outlier. The majority of NFL QBs are closer to the Daniel Jones range, and the going rate for that in a guaranteed world is going to be over $300 million — on the low end.
The years don’t even matter when you’re talking that much money. It’s a heavy cap commitment no matter how you slice it, and it puts a whole lot of eggs in a single basket.
So, using the New York Giants in this example, what if instead of re-upping with Jones, a slightly better-than-average quarterback, the Giants could turn to a QB they’d drafted and had seen produce in practice? It’s essentially what the 49ers are doing. They may have traded a couple of first-round picks to move up to select Trey Lance, but Monday GM John Lynch said Brock Purdy is their guy.
Purdy was never in their future plans when they selected him dead last in last year’s draft. And yes, they turned to him out of necessity. But they were able to turn to him because they drafted him a year after they traded up to pick Lance. And now Purdy is their future, and they only had to guarantee him $77,008 — no, that's not missing any zeroes — at signing.
Drafting quarterbacks is already a crapshoot, even when selecting high. But over the last 10 years an average of 11 QBs have been selected annually, meaning each team has picked, on average, just one QB about every three years. That for the most important position on the field.
(To put it in perspective, 24 running backs were selected last year, 20 the year before that.)
From a pure odds perspective, it makes sense that the more swings you take, the more hits you’ll get. But that’s always been the case, and yet it hasn’t been the strategy when it comes to drafting quarterbacks.
It might have to be soon, though, if only out of necessity. If you’re going to commit that much guaranteed money to one player, it has to be the right player.
In the NFL right now, how many “right” QBs are there? I count six, at most: Mahomes, Josh Allen, Justin Herbert, Joe Burrow, Trevor Lawrence and I’ll squeeze in Jalen Hurts (an example of taking a QB when you already have one). Lamar, the QB, would make the list, but Lamar the injury-prone QB is too much of a risk to go fully guaranteed.
That’s the bar. It’s high. It has to be if you’re allocating 25-30 percent of your cap space to one player. He not only needs to perform, but he has to be available. If you don’t get both, you’re sunk.
The endgame is to get there one day, to pay the fully guaranteed contract because you found the right player. And the best way to find that player is to take a whole lot of swings.
The league isn’t quite there yet. But the economics of it all may soon force them to be.
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