I heard ESPN talking about the falcons treating this differently than the Watson situation last year. First, of course they are, they drafted a QB. Second, Watson was coming to Atlanta until the Browns offered to give him a fully Guaranteed contract. The falcons weren’t ordering that nonsense. The Browns are the only team stupid enough to do what they did. There is no collusion. Other teams just aren’t stupid. I think Jackson deserves it more than Watson based on character, but Jackson hasn’t finished the last two years. Why would anyone guarantee that contract?
I hope somebody makes a joke about that one player who is fat or maybe finds a way to work in a Mister Big Chest reference. Those are always hilarious.
Why do people say this? Lamar having an agent would change what the Ravens are offering?
He seems very set on having Deshaun Watson’s contract be the bar for his new deal. I don’t get how any agent would change things from where they are.
He’s never had an agent and Lamar’s locked in to what he wants. The Ravens wait until after.
All an agent can do is be against him as they leak confidential information to Schefter and the like all day long.
Well given what Kyler Murray and Russell Wilson just signed last offseason, no agent worth a damn is advising Lamar to sign the Ravens’ current offer.
And why do you think an agent would provide some magical change of perspective. Obviously there are many other people in Lamar’s life giving him guidance on this.
But the issue is as good as Lamar is he's not worth record setting money. I understand seeing Watson and being like wtf if scumbag over there can get the record contract surely I deserve it. But that was a rare circumstance of cluster fuck insanity. The other 31 teams aren't going to repeat that with a year of hindsight now on the books.
An agent would hopefully help Lamar see what his true monetary value is and they'd have a signed deal already and Lamar would have a 100 million+ guaranteed in his contract. And let's not act like that's a bad contract by any means
We dont know that. He’s never said that and he has no agent leaking information. All we have is the Ravens or machine and the owners’ collusion statements.
> Well given what Kyler Murray and Russell Wilson just signed last offseason, no agent worth a damn is advising Lamar to sign the Ravens’ current offer.
Our offer was considerably better than both. I'd seriously doubt this.
Boras can work Pro Bono if he wants, I think Lamar sees it as pretty cut and dry what he's worth and why pay an agent part of that? It's a valid strategy to maximize his biggest payday to date and likely ever.
Lol what? You have no way of knowing that.
Ironically Scott Boras would be the exact person to slam Deshaun Watson’s contract in the Ravens’ face, and he’s notorious for being difficult to deal with.
If anything you’re making Lamar sound like Scott Boras here…maybe he’s not so dumb after all.
Lamar has never had an agent and there’s no negotiation. Whatever his price is, is his price, and he’s locked in.
If an agent can get a team to pay what they don’t want to pay, he should be everyone’s agent.
Franchise quarterbacks are the most important players on every single team. There has only been one in his prime that was ever a true free agent. Cousins. And he was sort of a franchise guy. That shows how important the franchise QBs are to every team. Very hard to get, you keep them at all cost. Just look at all the bad team with no shot because of their QB. Some who haven’t had a shot in over a decade. Let your’s walk or retire…
The multi-billionaire NFL owners have the public brainwashed against the players.
No owner or GM would sign a player by % of cap bc that eliminates the possibility of restructuring the deal or using signing bonuses to alleviate the cap hit in current years.
Burrow, Herbert, and Hurts will all be signing for 45-55 per year but the cap hit each year will constantly be a moving target to help with however the roster needs to be built for that season
The precedent is the combination of top of market money AND fully guaranteed. Teams don't care about just being guaranteed, but there needs to be a tradeoff for that taking on of additional risk. It's either going to be a shorter deal or a lower value deal or some combination of both, which Cousins was.
Well, not only do cap hits not really matter that much, but it's not about that. It's about fully guaranteed or not. Plus, Cousins' deal was designed to be extended and wasn't a bloated five year deal or anything.
Lamar rejected a five year deal that was effectively 3 years/$133m fully guaranteed (it was a contract designed to be extended after three years, but Lamar didn't want that, he wanted the guarantees immediately).
It does. There are several owners who want to spend as close to cap as possible. There are teams like the Eagles/Saints whose owners have no problem kicking money into the future for an advantage this year, but the reality is about half the teams in the NFL adhere very close to the "cash to cap" model.
Basically if your owner didn't buy the team with revenue from an outside business and uses the NFL team as a primary source of funding for the team, they're not going to have the cash reserves to offer fully guaranteed contracts.
When Watson's deal was completed Haslam and the Browns put every cent of that contract into escrow, which houses the money throughout the length of his contract. This happens for every dollar of gauranteed money in every contract.
If every contract were to become fully gauranteed each owner would need around $750,000,000 in liquid cash to be sitting in escrow accounts.
People who think the cap "isn't real" are ignoring about half of the league
"The cap isn't real" means "Some GMs leverage the future to gain a short term advantage and end up having to make hard decisions (like letting Trey Hendrickson or CJGJ walk in FA), and the percieved prudence of that strategy depends entirely on whether they win a super bowl."
Only the GMs who have the money. Every GM would be kicking money into the future to make room for the players they want if they could.
There's a reason some teams are run at an elite level and other teams don't even give their coaches free coffee and charge their players to use the facilities in the off-season.
I disagree, I think some teams would still have the approach of trying to maintain a good team long term rather than go all in by mortgaging the future, even if cash wasn’t an issue.
as long as the player is on the team you can massage that number pretty freely. It only ever becomes a major issue when you cut the player, trade the player, or they retire. Then you cant kick that can down the road any longer.
Convert chunks to signing bonuses, add void years, front load it, adjust a bunch of cash if your team suddenly has a chunk of cap space for whatever reason to pay a guy a little more.
Because cap hits can be manipulated so much to the point that you can't really compare two players based on their cap hit.
Amount paid (e.g. salary, signing bonuses, future guarantees) are more of an apples to apples comparison. If you have a player with a 20M cap hit, that could be someone making 5M this year with 15M of dead money from previous bonuses, or it could be someone making 15M this year with 5M of dead money from previous bonuses. When it comes to making decisions about extensions or trading or cutting players, that 5M vs 15M is a lot more important than the 20M vs 20M cap hit comparison.
Well, you can move the money around pretty easily by restructuring, extending, everything. But it's not about the cap hit with Lamar anyway.
Plus, you have to spend 90% of the cap anyway.
What might seem unreasonable today might be extremely reasonable in 4-5 seasons.
I don't think any team is giving him 5 years/$250m fully guaranteed.
But even some of the contracts we thought were unreasonable at the time, such as Mahomes' rolling guarantee deal, don't actually look unreasonable right now.
A lot of the contracts that were lauded as, "The most expensive QB deal ever!" were just average money after a couple of years because deals went up overall.
Now, I'm not saying that you don't end up losing parts of your team when you pay your QB a boatload, because you do.
> Mobile QBs age poorly. Idk what this is such a hard concept.
There are multiple reasons no one wants to give Lamar the deal he's asking for, including this one.
> A lot of the contracts that were lauded as, "The most expensive QB deal ever!" were just average money after a couple of years because deals went up overall.
I've been saying this about Watson's contract from day one. Which isn't to say it's a "good" deal or anything. And it's all moot if he looks as bad as he did last season. Plus, the dude is scum and the Browns deserve all the criticism they get.
But as insane as his 2026 cap hit of $64M looked back in 2022, it seems a little less ridiculous in 2023 when guys like Daniel Jones and Derek Carr both got contracts with $55M cap hits for that season.
Yeah, the cap rises and so do contracts. Even if Watson ever does play well, the money is really high, but we will eventually see another QB getting $230m in guaranteed money because the cap will keep rising and QBs will keep asking for a similar percentage of the cap.
Yeah, like I said, I wouldn't call it a good contract, but I don't think it's as egregious (from a cap/football point of view) as people make it out to be. (That's assuming Watson is a top five type QB, which is definitely a question at this point.)
Because they only tell a portion of the story and not a useful portion, so in practice they just confuse the hell out of people like OP.
For example, Kirk's third year salary cap hit with the Vikings was actually only $21M or 10.6% of the salary cap as he was extended and signing bonuses greatly reduced the cap hit for that year. Same thing with a player like Deshaun Watson, who entered 2023 with a cap hit of $54M but after the restructure will play 2023 with a cap hit of only $17M or 7.67%.
The salary cap is important and useful if you know how to read and use it but if you don't then you're going to miss the forest for the trees.
The reluctance to pay Lamar $250m fully guaranteed has nothing to do with cap hits, though.
Percentage ends up mattering more than anything, not the exact number, and you can move it around anyway, especially with extensions.
Of course it has to do with the cap lol. If the cap wasn’t there, the guarantees wouldn’t be an issue because you could just spend over the cap. Instead, now there’s the potential to be paying a shit ton of money to a player you potentially might not want and thus have less to build the rest of the team.
It's not that cap hits don't matter, but this is about not wanting to set a precedent of paying fully guaranteed money to a QB. In a sport where injuries are this rampant, it makes sense to not.
Moreover, you can shift cap hits, so they're not always as onerous as they sound.
Also, OP's numbers were way off in terms of dollar amounts anyway.
> It's not that cap hits don't matter, but this is about not wanting to set a precedent of paying fully guaranteed money to a QB
I mean, the precedent has been set already. But the only team dumb enough to hand out that kind of contract already has.
> Moreover, you can shift cap hits, so they're not always as onerous as they sound.
I’m aware you can shift them around, that much guaranteed money is still going to be a bitch to work around. An NFL team is going to have about 1.25B to build their team over the next five years. Someone eating a fifth of that is a problem regardless of when they eat it. The team being stuck with him eating it regardless of performance is the larger issue, especially when he’s had exactly one season that would warrant such a hit lol
Yeah, and the other 31 teams are adamantly against handing out similar deals.
> I’m aware you can shift them around, that much guaranteed money is still going to be a bitch to work around.
Yeah, you'll be hamstrung, regardless, but you can probably shift some, and maybe even trade and dump and deal with it. There are ways to get out from under it, even if it's not something you want.
> especially when he’s had exactly one season that would warrant such a hit lol
Yeah, you're right about that.
They always say that for a football player, the most important ability is availability. I think that if Lamar was on the market last year, he probably would have got DeShaun's deal. I just don't think there are any opportunities available for him to get the kind of money that he believes he deserves.
Daniel Jones deal is fine justification from the player side, but from a team side looking at a bad deal isn’t part of their equation
This thought process would have given every DT leverage to have a $100m deal after Albert Haynesworth. It’s the same wave for every QB asking for a higher contract than Flacco because he had the leverage of having the best playoff run in history and half the league had the leverage of “we’re better than Flacco”
The Ravens want 600 million from tax payers to upgrade the stadium. I’m not interested in hearing about how ownership can’t afford to pay him. 100% of the roadblocks to getting the deal done were created by the owners to pay players less.
Ownership is going to pay +90% of the cap no matter what. How much money ownership has doesn't have anything to do with how much they pay their players.
If there weren't a cap a team like the Broncos who were just bough by an owner who is worth as much as every owner in the bottom half of the league combined could pay double what those franchises could. The NFL is popular because any year a garbage team like the Bengals, Colts, Chargers, or Jets can build a team that competes with the richest owners. If we didn't have that then the Broncos and Panthers would turn into the Yankees/Red Socks and any team outside of that is a feeder system like the Padres.
> How much money ownership has doesn't have anything to do with how much they pay their players.
Not entirely true, because that 90% mark isn't guaranteed cash, it's only relative to the salary cap.
When a player gets guaranteed money, it has to immediately be put in escrow - so in this circumstance, it does matter how much ownership has, because there is a huge difference in a player getting a 1 year $20m contract with only $5m guaranteed and a fully guaranteed 1 year $20m contract as far as ownership is concerned. Ownership has to have that cash liquid and available.
The whole escrow situation was created by owners so they could do exactly what the Ravens are doing now, throw up their hands and say see the rules just make this impossible.
It was actually done by the CBA so a situation like Doug Flutie with the CFL doesn't happen.
Imagine if a team had the ability to declare bankruptcy and void all contracts then start fresh
It's not that clean but a team could absolutely declare bankruptcy and there'd be no money to pay players. And with how the NFL works the owners are either on the hook if a team goes bankrupt or at least don't want to deal with the inevitable lawsuit.
The team would still have assets to pay off the players. Alex Rodriguez is still being paid by the current Texas Ranger ownership after the previous ownership filed bankruptcy.
Someone wants to own that franchise and they will take on the previous owners debts in order to do so.
I like that there was one week where approximately ZERO Browns fans knew about the NFL's escrow rule and then one week later approximately EVERY Browns fans knew about the NFL's escrow rule.
How much more do baseball payers make…and it’s all guaranteed. The parity is a nice excuse for the salary cap but the reason for the cap is to suppress salaries and save ownership money.
The [Yankees total payroll](https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/payroll/) is $268.9m, The Diamondbacks is $103.8m, the Athletics is $43.1m.
DeRape Watson is getting $46m in cash this year. Before taxes he could pay the Athletics team. If you let the NFL go the way of baseball then we'll be watching the Cowboys and the Broncos in the Super Bowl every year while XFL players start for the Raiders/Colts because the Bronco's backup QB could start for half the league.
Oh yeah the poor Athletics, the billionaire owner, who also owns several other pro sports teams, just can’t afford to pay more.
Or is it more likely he just makes more money from the payroll choices he makes?
I mean I'm all for eat the rich and fuck the owners, but I'm also trying to look at this situation through the lens of where we are.
If we go to fully guaranteed contracts and the balance of power shifts to the owners who can pay the most then parity will no longer be protected and we run the risk of teams who are family owned and operated doing the same thing. If it weren't for the cap minimum spend rules there would definitely be owners trying to operate on a team full of league minimum players.
>100% of the roadblocks to getting the deal done were created by the owners to pay players less.
Hey, their hands are tied by that escrow rule they've elected to keep in place for the last fifty years!
But yeah, much of what we're seeing is exactly what the franchise tag is designed to do. Players have no leverage outside of pulling a Costanza to get themselves fired (traded, really). And any new team has to give up two first round picks PLUS a new contract PLUS the possibility that the Ravens will match the offer anyway? The tag is designed to be as difficult as possible to sidestep.
Yeah the overwhelming acceptance of billionaire propaganda that people just treat as the truth really bugs me.
The issue is always ownership doesn’t want to pay market value for players so they create rules that make it impossible to pay market value players.
Someone on this sub this morning said something along the lines of, “I'm sick of entitled millionaires asking for more money”.. Ignoring the fact that it's billionaires refusing to pay out fair labor contracts lol.
I like when people talk about how Lamar isn't worth $X millions a year. Cool, cool... maybe that's the case, but it's odd that we NOW care about players getting paid what they're worth.
Because if that's something we've always sincerely cared about then Lamar should have held out after 2019 when he made all of $1M for his MVP season.
The acceptable of only star players making money is disgusting. Until the rules change the more money players like lamar make the less the other players on the team make. He’s stealing from his team mates just as much as the owners. And when players are approaching billionaire status it’s getting harder and harder to just say fuck the owners pay the players whatever. Nfl makes serious money but there comes a point where it’s not infinite and having 1 player taking up 30 percent of your money with 50 plus other guys needing to be paid is insanity. If fans fought as hard at their regular job for higher wages as they do for star nfl players like lamar we’d have a better country. Simps are out of control on the lamar shit.
Oh you mean the salary cap that owners created to pay players less?
Do you use the same logic in you job? You turn down pay raises bc it would just be taking money from your fellow employees?
Just release Lamar free and clear and we could see what his actual market value is, owners don’t want that bc it’s likely far more than what they will end up paying.
Completely agree.
I think part of the problem (at least in terms of public perception) has been that the guys who have gone up against the League on these things were already kind of divisive with NFL fans. Lamar, Le'Veon, Watson, Kaep... going back a ways, Maurice Clarrett.
They were all guys some fans already didn't like or who had non-typical skill sets or were just bad dudes. Guys like Mahomes aren't fighting the fight.
That’s fair but I think it’s at least possible that the League and ownership play a role in how those players are portrayed in the media. Obviously some of them brought negative press on themselves, Watson certainly did and he got paid anyway.
If I’m a Ravens beat writer maintaining a relationship with the team is always going to be more important than with a player who best case scenario is gone in 10 years. I’m not implying it’s necessarily nefarious, but I think it’s within the realm of possibility.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I wasn't suggesting otherwise. They definitely put on the media blitz and would do the same to a more universally loved player too if needed.
It's just kind of easy to turn public opinion against a guy like Lamar because he hasn't exactly made himself look great throughout this and there are legit questions/concerns about his style of play.
How does ownership wanting money from the city to build the stadium imply they have money tucked away to pay Lamar? The whole reason they are asking is because they don't have 600 million lying around and would prefer the city float the bill and take whatever cut of ticket sales they want rather than front the 600 mil themselves.
Kirk was franchised twice, in those 2 seasons he played every game, threw for 9,000 yards, 52 TDs, 25 ints and his best WRs were Pierre Garcon and Jamison Crowder
In Lamar's last two seasons he's missed 5 games per season, had 6,655 total yards, 38 total touchdowns, and 20 ints
People saw Lamar's MVP season in 2019 and want to completely ignore that fact that he's regressed in recent years and now has injuries mounting up
Stats are great but if you watched the ravens you’d see he won us games all the time and made up for roster/injury deficiencies all over the offense. Not a coincidence we struggled before he started and any time he has been out.
I get that the math is comparable but Hamster Loaf is on an iron man streak that Jackson is just so far away from. With Hamster Loaf, it basically doesn't matter that it was fully guaranteed because they got all the games they could out of him.
This is a nice comparison, but that is the biggest gap between them. That, and Jackson is better and clearly above the Hamster Loaf Line.
I heard ESPN talking about the falcons treating this differently than the Watson situation last year. First, of course they are, they drafted a QB. Second, Watson was coming to Atlanta until the Browns offered to give him a fully Guaranteed contract. The falcons weren’t ordering that nonsense. The Browns are the only team stupid enough to do what they did. There is no collusion. Other teams just aren’t stupid. I think Jackson deserves it more than Watson based on character, but Jackson hasn’t finished the last two years. Why would anyone guarantee that contract?
If Lamar had an agent we wouldn't be discussing any of this.
It’s not a discussion, it’s a different version of the same jokes while they pat themselves for being clever
Premature regurgiated jokes all based on unsubstantiated rumors
“SPEedHaWk wOUldNt NeeD aN AgENt”
he wouldnt
I hope somebody makes a joke about that one player who is fat or maybe finds a way to work in a Mister Big Chest reference. Those are always hilarious.
Rodgers got an agent and yall treating him like lamar
Why do people say this? Lamar having an agent would change what the Ravens are offering? He seems very set on having Deshaun Watson’s contract be the bar for his new deal. I don’t get how any agent would change things from where they are.
It would change his perspective and provide guidance. Which he doesn't have.
He’s never had an agent and Lamar’s locked in to what he wants. The Ravens wait until after. All an agent can do is be against him as they leak confidential information to Schefter and the like all day long.
Unlike how this process hasn't been leaked.
Well given what Kyler Murray and Russell Wilson just signed last offseason, no agent worth a damn is advising Lamar to sign the Ravens’ current offer. And why do you think an agent would provide some magical change of perspective. Obviously there are many other people in Lamar’s life giving him guidance on this.
But the issue is as good as Lamar is he's not worth record setting money. I understand seeing Watson and being like wtf if scumbag over there can get the record contract surely I deserve it. But that was a rare circumstance of cluster fuck insanity. The other 31 teams aren't going to repeat that with a year of hindsight now on the books. An agent would hopefully help Lamar see what his true monetary value is and they'd have a signed deal already and Lamar would have a 100 million+ guaranteed in his contract. And let's not act like that's a bad contract by any means
I don’t think Lamar is comparing his offer against those offers. He’s looking at D Watson’s deal.
We dont know that. He’s never said that and he has no agent leaking information. All we have is the Ravens or machine and the owners’ collusion statements.
> Well given what Kyler Murray and Russell Wilson just signed last offseason, no agent worth a damn is advising Lamar to sign the Ravens’ current offer. Our offer was considerably better than both. I'd seriously doubt this.
Lol the offer was barely even better than leaving him on the franchise tag for 3 years.
They always ignore the comments proving them completely wrong lmao
The Ravens would compromise easier with an agent then someone who doesn't know negotiation. There's a reason Boras is worth half a billion.
Boras can work Pro Bono if he wants, I think Lamar sees it as pretty cut and dry what he's worth and why pay an agent part of that? It's a valid strategy to maximize his biggest payday to date and likely ever.
Lol what? You have no way of knowing that. Ironically Scott Boras would be the exact person to slam Deshaun Watson’s contract in the Ravens’ face, and he’s notorious for being difficult to deal with. If anything you’re making Lamar sound like Scott Boras here…maybe he’s not so dumb after all.
I forgot the billions of contracts that have happened in the history of time.
Of which you’ve been apart of none so yes, you don’t know anything about how negotiations work.
Lamar has never had an agent and there’s no negotiation. Whatever his price is, is his price, and he’s locked in. If an agent can get a team to pay what they don’t want to pay, he should be everyone’s agent. Franchise quarterbacks are the most important players on every single team. There has only been one in his prime that was ever a true free agent. Cousins. And he was sort of a franchise guy. That shows how important the franchise QBs are to every team. Very hard to get, you keep them at all cost. Just look at all the bad team with no shot because of their QB. Some who haven’t had a shot in over a decade. Let your’s walk or retire… The multi-billionaire NFL owners have the public brainwashed against the players.
An agent would probably sabotage their own client to get himself paid
or if yall had girlfriends and lives, but no blame Lamar
No owner or GM would sign a player by % of cap bc that eliminates the possibility of restructuring the deal or using signing bonuses to alleviate the cap hit in current years. Burrow, Herbert, and Hurts will all be signing for 45-55 per year but the cap hit each year will constantly be a moving target to help with however the roster needs to be built for that season
If you're looking at cap hits you're already doing it wrong.
It's not about the raw money, it's about the precedent it sets.
It's not about money, it's about sending a message.
Dude, stop colluding
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Cousins didn't set anything, fully guaranteed at that price doesn't move the needle, and Cleveland was on crack.
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The precedent is the combination of top of market money AND fully guaranteed. Teams don't care about just being guaranteed, but there needs to be a tradeoff for that taking on of additional risk. It's either going to be a shorter deal or a lower value deal or some combination of both, which Cousins was.
At this point idk if it would be too much of a package since they already know lamar isn’t coming back.
Well, not only do cap hits not really matter that much, but it's not about that. It's about fully guaranteed or not. Plus, Cousins' deal was designed to be extended and wasn't a bloated five year deal or anything. Lamar rejected a five year deal that was effectively 3 years/$133m fully guaranteed (it was a contract designed to be extended after three years, but Lamar didn't want that, he wanted the guarantees immediately).
Cap hits matter wtf you talking about lol
Why does cap hit not matter?
It does. There are several owners who want to spend as close to cap as possible. There are teams like the Eagles/Saints whose owners have no problem kicking money into the future for an advantage this year, but the reality is about half the teams in the NFL adhere very close to the "cash to cap" model. Basically if your owner didn't buy the team with revenue from an outside business and uses the NFL team as a primary source of funding for the team, they're not going to have the cash reserves to offer fully guaranteed contracts. When Watson's deal was completed Haslam and the Browns put every cent of that contract into escrow, which houses the money throughout the length of his contract. This happens for every dollar of gauranteed money in every contract. If every contract were to become fully gauranteed each owner would need around $750,000,000 in liquid cash to be sitting in escrow accounts. People who think the cap "isn't real" are ignoring about half of the league
"The cap isn't real" means "Some GMs leverage the future to gain a short term advantage and end up having to make hard decisions (like letting Trey Hendrickson or CJGJ walk in FA), and the percieved prudence of that strategy depends entirely on whether they win a super bowl."
Borrowing future cap only works after a couple years if you can draft well
True, but if you don't draft anyone worth extending you're gonna suck no matter what.
Only the GMs who have the money. Every GM would be kicking money into the future to make room for the players they want if they could. There's a reason some teams are run at an elite level and other teams don't even give their coaches free coffee and charge their players to use the facilities in the off-season.
I disagree, I think some teams would still have the approach of trying to maintain a good team long term rather than go all in by mortgaging the future, even if cash wasn’t an issue.
Interesting ..legit did not know this. Thanks.
as long as the player is on the team you can massage that number pretty freely. It only ever becomes a major issue when you cut the player, trade the player, or they retire. Then you cant kick that can down the road any longer. Convert chunks to signing bonuses, add void years, front load it, adjust a bunch of cash if your team suddenly has a chunk of cap space for whatever reason to pay a guy a little more.
Because cap hits can be manipulated so much to the point that you can't really compare two players based on their cap hit. Amount paid (e.g. salary, signing bonuses, future guarantees) are more of an apples to apples comparison. If you have a player with a 20M cap hit, that could be someone making 5M this year with 15M of dead money from previous bonuses, or it could be someone making 15M this year with 5M of dead money from previous bonuses. When it comes to making decisions about extensions or trading or cutting players, that 5M vs 15M is a lot more important than the 20M vs 20M cap hit comparison.
Well, you can move the money around pretty easily by restructuring, extending, everything. But it's not about the cap hit with Lamar anyway. Plus, you have to spend 90% of the cap anyway. What might seem unreasonable today might be extremely reasonable in 4-5 seasons.
I promise you the Lamar contract if signed for 4-5 years will be unreasonable. Mobile QBs age poorly. Idk what this is such a hard concept.
I don't think any team is giving him 5 years/$250m fully guaranteed. But even some of the contracts we thought were unreasonable at the time, such as Mahomes' rolling guarantee deal, don't actually look unreasonable right now. A lot of the contracts that were lauded as, "The most expensive QB deal ever!" were just average money after a couple of years because deals went up overall. Now, I'm not saying that you don't end up losing parts of your team when you pay your QB a boatload, because you do. > Mobile QBs age poorly. Idk what this is such a hard concept. There are multiple reasons no one wants to give Lamar the deal he's asking for, including this one.
> A lot of the contracts that were lauded as, "The most expensive QB deal ever!" were just average money after a couple of years because deals went up overall. I've been saying this about Watson's contract from day one. Which isn't to say it's a "good" deal or anything. And it's all moot if he looks as bad as he did last season. Plus, the dude is scum and the Browns deserve all the criticism they get. But as insane as his 2026 cap hit of $64M looked back in 2022, it seems a little less ridiculous in 2023 when guys like Daniel Jones and Derek Carr both got contracts with $55M cap hits for that season.
Yeah, the cap rises and so do contracts. Even if Watson ever does play well, the money is really high, but we will eventually see another QB getting $230m in guaranteed money because the cap will keep rising and QBs will keep asking for a similar percentage of the cap.
Yeah, like I said, I wouldn't call it a good contract, but I don't think it's as egregious (from a cap/football point of view) as people make it out to be. (That's assuming Watson is a top five type QB, which is definitely a question at this point.)
Because they only tell a portion of the story and not a useful portion, so in practice they just confuse the hell out of people like OP. For example, Kirk's third year salary cap hit with the Vikings was actually only $21M or 10.6% of the salary cap as he was extended and signing bonuses greatly reduced the cap hit for that year. Same thing with a player like Deshaun Watson, who entered 2023 with a cap hit of $54M but after the restructure will play 2023 with a cap hit of only $17M or 7.67%. The salary cap is important and useful if you know how to read and use it but if you don't then you're going to miss the forest for the trees.
It does and is reflective of the money the players get. People who are saying otherwise don’t understand the cap
My guy, cap hits are the only thing that matter lol
The reluctance to pay Lamar $250m fully guaranteed has nothing to do with cap hits, though. Percentage ends up mattering more than anything, not the exact number, and you can move it around anyway, especially with extensions.
Of course it has to do with the cap lol. If the cap wasn’t there, the guarantees wouldn’t be an issue because you could just spend over the cap. Instead, now there’s the potential to be paying a shit ton of money to a player you potentially might not want and thus have less to build the rest of the team.
It's not that cap hits don't matter, but this is about not wanting to set a precedent of paying fully guaranteed money to a QB. In a sport where injuries are this rampant, it makes sense to not. Moreover, you can shift cap hits, so they're not always as onerous as they sound. Also, OP's numbers were way off in terms of dollar amounts anyway.
> It's not that cap hits don't matter, but this is about not wanting to set a precedent of paying fully guaranteed money to a QB I mean, the precedent has been set already. But the only team dumb enough to hand out that kind of contract already has. > Moreover, you can shift cap hits, so they're not always as onerous as they sound. I’m aware you can shift them around, that much guaranteed money is still going to be a bitch to work around. An NFL team is going to have about 1.25B to build their team over the next five years. Someone eating a fifth of that is a problem regardless of when they eat it. The team being stuck with him eating it regardless of performance is the larger issue, especially when he’s had exactly one season that would warrant such a hit lol
Yeah, and the other 31 teams are adamantly against handing out similar deals. > I’m aware you can shift them around, that much guaranteed money is still going to be a bitch to work around. Yeah, you'll be hamstrung, regardless, but you can probably shift some, and maybe even trade and dump and deal with it. There are ways to get out from under it, even if it's not something you want. > especially when he’s had exactly one season that would warrant such a hit lol Yeah, you're right about that.
Anytime who is willing to give Lamar that sort of contract likely believes he is worth the additional 5% of the cap.
They always say that for a football player, the most important ability is availability. I think that if Lamar was on the market last year, he probably would have got DeShaun's deal. I just don't think there are any opportunities available for him to get the kind of money that he believes he deserves.
Hamster Loaf doesn't miss go games
[удалено]
Daniel Jones deal is fine justification from the player side, but from a team side looking at a bad deal isn’t part of their equation This thought process would have given every DT leverage to have a $100m deal after Albert Haynesworth. It’s the same wave for every QB asking for a higher contract than Flacco because he had the leverage of having the best playoff run in history and half the league had the leverage of “we’re better than Flacco”
The Ravens want 600 million from tax payers to upgrade the stadium. I’m not interested in hearing about how ownership can’t afford to pay him. 100% of the roadblocks to getting the deal done were created by the owners to pay players less.
Ownership is going to pay +90% of the cap no matter what. How much money ownership has doesn't have anything to do with how much they pay their players. If there weren't a cap a team like the Broncos who were just bough by an owner who is worth as much as every owner in the bottom half of the league combined could pay double what those franchises could. The NFL is popular because any year a garbage team like the Bengals, Colts, Chargers, or Jets can build a team that competes with the richest owners. If we didn't have that then the Broncos and Panthers would turn into the Yankees/Red Socks and any team outside of that is a feeder system like the Padres.
The Padres aren't a feeding team these days.
The Rays are and they're still elite.
> How much money ownership has doesn't have anything to do with how much they pay their players. Not entirely true, because that 90% mark isn't guaranteed cash, it's only relative to the salary cap. When a player gets guaranteed money, it has to immediately be put in escrow - so in this circumstance, it does matter how much ownership has, because there is a huge difference in a player getting a 1 year $20m contract with only $5m guaranteed and a fully guaranteed 1 year $20m contract as far as ownership is concerned. Ownership has to have that cash liquid and available.
The whole escrow situation was created by owners so they could do exactly what the Ravens are doing now, throw up their hands and say see the rules just make this impossible.
It was actually done by the CBA so a situation like Doug Flutie with the CFL doesn't happen. Imagine if a team had the ability to declare bankruptcy and void all contracts then start fresh
That’s not how bankruptcy works at all.
It's not that clean but a team could absolutely declare bankruptcy and there'd be no money to pay players. And with how the NFL works the owners are either on the hook if a team goes bankrupt or at least don't want to deal with the inevitable lawsuit.
The team would still have assets to pay off the players. Alex Rodriguez is still being paid by the current Texas Ranger ownership after the previous ownership filed bankruptcy. Someone wants to own that franchise and they will take on the previous owners debts in order to do so.
From my understanding, the escrow rule is a League rule. It is NOT in the CBA (which is publicly available online).
Not gonna find me supporting the owners, that's for damn sure. A parade of shameless carnies.
I like that there was one week where approximately ZERO Browns fans knew about the NFL's escrow rule and then one week later approximately EVERY Browns fans knew about the NFL's escrow rule.
Surprisingly it's probably most relevant to the Browns due to the stadium situation.
How much more do baseball payers make…and it’s all guaranteed. The parity is a nice excuse for the salary cap but the reason for the cap is to suppress salaries and save ownership money.
The [Yankees total payroll](https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/payroll/) is $268.9m, The Diamondbacks is $103.8m, the Athletics is $43.1m. DeRape Watson is getting $46m in cash this year. Before taxes he could pay the Athletics team. If you let the NFL go the way of baseball then we'll be watching the Cowboys and the Broncos in the Super Bowl every year while XFL players start for the Raiders/Colts because the Bronco's backup QB could start for half the league.
Oh yeah the poor Athletics, the billionaire owner, who also owns several other pro sports teams, just can’t afford to pay more. Or is it more likely he just makes more money from the payroll choices he makes?
I mean I'm all for eat the rich and fuck the owners, but I'm also trying to look at this situation through the lens of where we are. If we go to fully guaranteed contracts and the balance of power shifts to the owners who can pay the most then parity will no longer be protected and we run the risk of teams who are family owned and operated doing the same thing. If it weren't for the cap minimum spend rules there would definitely be owners trying to operate on a team full of league minimum players.
There's more parity in baseball recently than the nfl despite no cap
>100% of the roadblocks to getting the deal done were created by the owners to pay players less. Hey, their hands are tied by that escrow rule they've elected to keep in place for the last fifty years! But yeah, much of what we're seeing is exactly what the franchise tag is designed to do. Players have no leverage outside of pulling a Costanza to get themselves fired (traded, really). And any new team has to give up two first round picks PLUS a new contract PLUS the possibility that the Ravens will match the offer anyway? The tag is designed to be as difficult as possible to sidestep.
Yeah the overwhelming acceptance of billionaire propaganda that people just treat as the truth really bugs me. The issue is always ownership doesn’t want to pay market value for players so they create rules that make it impossible to pay market value players.
Someone on this sub this morning said something along the lines of, “I'm sick of entitled millionaires asking for more money”.. Ignoring the fact that it's billionaires refusing to pay out fair labor contracts lol.
I like when people talk about how Lamar isn't worth $X millions a year. Cool, cool... maybe that's the case, but it's odd that we NOW care about players getting paid what they're worth. Because if that's something we've always sincerely cared about then Lamar should have held out after 2019 when he made all of $1M for his MVP season.
The acceptable of only star players making money is disgusting. Until the rules change the more money players like lamar make the less the other players on the team make. He’s stealing from his team mates just as much as the owners. And when players are approaching billionaire status it’s getting harder and harder to just say fuck the owners pay the players whatever. Nfl makes serious money but there comes a point where it’s not infinite and having 1 player taking up 30 percent of your money with 50 plus other guys needing to be paid is insanity. If fans fought as hard at their regular job for higher wages as they do for star nfl players like lamar we’d have a better country. Simps are out of control on the lamar shit.
Oh you mean the salary cap that owners created to pay players less? Do you use the same logic in you job? You turn down pay raises bc it would just be taking money from your fellow employees? Just release Lamar free and clear and we could see what his actual market value is, owners don’t want that bc it’s likely far more than what they will end up paying.
Completely agree. I think part of the problem (at least in terms of public perception) has been that the guys who have gone up against the League on these things were already kind of divisive with NFL fans. Lamar, Le'Veon, Watson, Kaep... going back a ways, Maurice Clarrett. They were all guys some fans already didn't like or who had non-typical skill sets or were just bad dudes. Guys like Mahomes aren't fighting the fight.
That’s fair but I think it’s at least possible that the League and ownership play a role in how those players are portrayed in the media. Obviously some of them brought negative press on themselves, Watson certainly did and he got paid anyway. If I’m a Ravens beat writer maintaining a relationship with the team is always going to be more important than with a player who best case scenario is gone in 10 years. I’m not implying it’s necessarily nefarious, but I think it’s within the realm of possibility.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I wasn't suggesting otherwise. They definitely put on the media blitz and would do the same to a more universally loved player too if needed. It's just kind of easy to turn public opinion against a guy like Lamar because he hasn't exactly made himself look great throughout this and there are legit questions/concerns about his style of play.
How does ownership wanting money from the city to build the stadium imply they have money tucked away to pay Lamar? The whole reason they are asking is because they don't have 600 million lying around and would prefer the city float the bill and take whatever cut of ticket sales they want rather than front the 600 mil themselves.
bc net worth = cash on hand /s
I mean, Lamar is a better QB than Kirk so you'd expect percentage of cap to be greater.
Kirk was franchised twice, in those 2 seasons he played every game, threw for 9,000 yards, 52 TDs, 25 ints and his best WRs were Pierre Garcon and Jamison Crowder In Lamar's last two seasons he's missed 5 games per season, had 6,655 total yards, 38 total touchdowns, and 20 ints People saw Lamar's MVP season in 2019 and want to completely ignore that fact that he's regressed in recent years and now has injuries mounting up
ppl were doing this same shit for Baker last year
Wait we're not seriously comparing any Ravens receiver during Lamar's tenure to Garcon and co are we?
So Lamar is putting up better per game stats? I already knew that, thats why I said he is better QB.
Your might want to go double check your math. Lamar falls just short and has more turnovers
Stats are great but if you watched the ravens you’d see he won us games all the time and made up for roster/injury deficiencies all over the offense. Not a coincidence we struggled before he started and any time he has been out.
Cousins never the talent and never will be the talent of Lamar lol
Thats fair, Cousins also hasn't missed a start due to injury in 8 years as a starter
He's also been pretty consistent his entire career
you might want to think more about this comment
I get that the math is comparable but Hamster Loaf is on an iron man streak that Jackson is just so far away from. With Hamster Loaf, it basically doesn't matter that it was fully guaranteed because they got all the games they could out of him. This is a nice comparison, but that is the biggest gap between them. That, and Jackson is better and clearly above the Hamster Loaf Line.
Will Lamar ever by MVP Lamar ?
how the hell are the average of the top five contracts only 30 million?