In any other industry, a net-zero return on a billion-dollar investment would be enough to threaten the entire enterprise. In the world of professional football, it probably is considered a necessary evil. We are talking about the money that quarterbacks take, and the returns it gives to the teams.
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More than a billion dollars have been invested in the four highest-paid quarterbacks in the National Football League right now. Dak Prescott, Joe Burrow, Josh Allen, and Jordan Love have each received a benchmark deal at some point in the past few years. The belief was that they would provide their franchise the best chance at winning the big one.
However, there’s not a single Super Bowl ring to show for it. To make matters even worse, only one of them made it to the playoffs this past season. And even then, Allen and his Buffalo Bills were still denied an AFC Championship appearance.
In fact, you’d have to go all the way down the pay sheet to the seventh and eighth-highest paid quarterbacks, Jared Goff and Brock Purdy, just to find a pair of signal callers who have even appeared in a Super Bowl in recent years. If you want to find the first one who’s actually managed to win a Super Bowl, well then you’d have to look outside of the top 1o altogether.
The Philadelphia Eagles’ Jalen Hurts, the 11th-highest-paid quarterback in terms of annual deals, is the first Super Bowl winner on the list. Four spots below him is the Kansas City Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes, the most decorated active QB in the NFL, and right behind him is this year’s MVP runner-up, Matthew Stafford.
Mahomes and Hurts are the only two quarterbacks who have managed to win a championship while also possessing a contract valued at $250+ million. The underlying point here is that, while there is always an exception to every rule, teams are struggling to strike a balance between paying their signal callers and reserving cash for other positions.
The quarterback position is regarded as the most important one in football. A less-than-competent signal caller can often throw you out of a game well before you ever had a chance to win it. Throw in the fact that an above-average QB is incredibly hard to find, and you get a market where the supply will rarely meet the demand.
It’s a great situation for players like Prescott, who consistently produce eye-popping passing totals just to come up short in the playoffs. However, the situation leaves their franchises in a tough spot.
The Seattle Seahawks seemed to have found a remedy to this dilemma by offering mid-tier money to a journeyman like Sam Darnold. They then surrounded him with more competent playmakers. Then again, there is no guarantee that this formula will work for everyone.
