In any other line of work, a net-zero return on a billion-dollar investment would be enough to threaten the entire industry. Still, in the world of professional football, it may be a necessary evil. More than one billion U.S. dollars have been invested into the four highest-paid quarterbacks in the National Football League today, and yet there’s not a single Super Bowl ring to show for it.
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Dak Prescott, Joe Burrow, Josh Allen, and Jordan Love have each received a benchmark deal at some point in the past few years, and all of them were predicated on the belief that they gave their franchise the best chance at winning the big one.
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. 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 on an annual basis, is the first to be found on the list. Four spots below him is the Kansas City Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes, the most decorated QB in the entire 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 often regarded as the most important one in all of football, as 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 almost never 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 on a routine basis, but it 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 in order to surround him with more competent playmakers, but that’s not guaranteed to work for everyone.
