- Joined
- Apr 7, 2013
- Messages
- 120,131
By Bob Sturm 1h ago
110 days since Super Bowl 53 in Atlanta, 132 days since the Cowboys lost in Los Angeles in the playoffs, 62 days until they depart for training camp in Oxnard and 107 days until they open their season at AT&T Stadium against the New York Giants at 3:25pm (not that we are counting)…
Trust me, loyal Cowboys fan, you aren’t the only team worried about paying your quarterback.
As we sit right in the middle of NFL contract season, a look around the landscape at all of the moving chess pieces at the game’s most valuable — and costly — position provides an important lesson: Perspective is your friend.
Imagine buying a house in a city you where have just relocated, without any knowledge of the market. You have no idea about comparable houses or recent sales history, leaving you to blindly communicate with sellers and simply take their idea of value to heart. They say their home is worth $200,000, and you are simply trying to see if that fits your personal budget. How did they arrive at that number, and is it a fair asking price? That doesn’t matter. You dig the house and neighborhood, so you buy what they’re selling.
That might be a satisfactory situation for you (assuming you have cash to burn), until you find it is time to sell the home. At that point, you might receive a dose of reality when it turns out you paid twice what the home was worth and the rest of the market doesn’t care what you paid. They only care about the current market rate, leaving your home worth $120,000. Congratulations, you’re short $80,000.
The scale is obviously different, but I think this is a valuable metaphor for the going rate of quarterbacks in the NFL.
With that in mind, I made a handy visual aid for today’s Riffing topic. Here for your enjoyment are the current contracts on each team’s depth chart at the QB position. (I only listed every team’s top two quarterbacks.) These numbers are all according to Spotrac.
I am sure you are wondering about the colors. Black ink is reserved for veteran QBs, those past their rookie contracts. Keep in mind, there are two types of veteran backups; those who are content to be backups, and those who still believe they should start. Usually, if they are in the latter group, they have very short, cheap deals so they can become unrestricted free agents in short order and find their next gig. Ryan Tannehill, Jacoby Brissett and Teddy Bridgewater are probably the top three candidates for that quest to be the “next Nick Foles”.
The green ink group includes all players on rookie contracts. These guys look cheap in this post-Sam Bradford era of slotted contracts, but only for a four-year window. And cheap is all relative, as Baker Mayfield and Sam Darnold are both making nearly $500,000 a game, and Kyler Murray will start his career with $35 million guaranteed whether or not he accomplishes much. So the clock ticks on these young lads, and this forces teams to put them on the field pretty quickly to soak up those four relatively inexpensive seasons. For instance, Pat Mahomes seems really young and cheap, but there is a good chance Kansas City will sign him to a $200 million deal within the next 18 months.
The very important FA column represents each player’s free agency year. If it says “2020,” it means that “2019” is the last year under contract. In other words, this is it for Dak Prescott, Marcus Mariota and Jameis Winston.
This brings us to the color red, which represents those who are playing on the fifth year of their rookie contracts. The fifth-year option is worth nearly $21 million for quarterbacks drafted as highly as Winston and Mariota in 2015, and both of their teams are sitting in a holding pattern as they mull over whether to give their quarterbacks a sweet new veteran contract that starts at somewhere around $25 to $30 million per a season.
2015 NFL DRAFT – Top 2 picks
(thanks, Wikipedia)
In fact, there is a very good chance both franchises are watching the Dak Prescott negotiation to further decide what to do. They can either pay a QB who is still trying to develop into what they dreamed he would be four years ago or start all over next April.
Let’s compare Winston and Mariota with Mr. Prescott. Keep in mind, Prescott has played one fewer season than either of the highly-drafted quarterbacks.
Statistical Comparison, Passing Stats, 2015-2018 (Winston, Mariota, Prescott)
| Jameis Winston | 56 | 1183 | 1922 | 61.6 | 14628 | 261.2 | 7.6 | 88 | 4.6 | 58 | 3 | 122 | 87.8 |
| Marcus Mariota | 56 | 1015 | 1605 | 63.2 | 12004 | 214.4 | 7.5 | 69 | 4.3 | 42 | 2.6 | 130 | 89.4 |
| Dak Prescott | 48 | 975 | 1475 | 66.1 | 10876 | 226.6 | 7.4 | 67 | 4.5 | 25 | 1.7 | 113 | 96 |
| Marcus Mariota | 56 | 218 | 1270 | 5.83 | 11 | 87 | 3.9 | 22.7 | 77 | 35.3 | 12 | 14 |
| Dak Prescott | 48 | 189 | 944 | 4.99 | 18 | 28 | 3.9 | 19.7 | 75 | 39.7 | 6 | 13 |
| Jameis Winston | 56 | 189 | 794 | 4.2 | 9 | 21 | 3.4 | 14.2 | 54 | 28.6 | 2 | 18 |
This third chart is possibly the most important one:
Statistical Comparison, TD/Turnover Stats, 2015-2018 (Winston, Mariota, Prescott)
| Marcus Mariota | 58 | 73 | 11 | 57 | 28 |
| Dak Prescott | 51 | 72 | 20 | 40 | 33 |
| Jameis Winston | 56 | 88 | 9 | 76 | 21 |
I included something that will make a lot of football people angry. I dared to account for QB Wins (#QBWinz) in this chart because I believe that a QB has a huge hand in winning games — or losing them, in this case.
As it pertains to these quarterbacks, I think that Giveaways column is vital. Touchdowns are great and important, but if you then erase a good touchdown with a bad giveaway, that is directly connected to his ledger. If you want to tell me a quarterback helps his team win, tell me about how rarely he gives the ball away.
The single best argument for Dak Prescott being this team’s QB moving forward is his ability to generate touchdowns (92 passing plus rushing TDs in 51 games) while not erasing them with costly giveaways (40). He averages well fewer than one giveaway per start. That is phenomenal. There is no shock that he has helped engineer 33 wins in three seasons.
Mariota is pretty much dead even: 58 starts and 57 giveaways. But his ratio of 84 touchdowns to 57 giveaways is enough to believe in, suggesting he can have a very bright future.
Winston? Wow. Bruce Arians has his work cut out for him. In 56 starts, Jameis has generated 97 touchdowns and an incredible 76 giveaways. Winston is not solely responsible for Tampa Bay’s mediocrity, but when he came out of Florida State, the top reason I preferred Mariota to Winston was the “LEEROY JENKINS” high-risk throws the Seminole insists on making into coverage down the middle of the field. Four years in the NFL have not affected this habit. Winston risks losing the ball far more than any quarterback you would consider paying the big bucks. If we believe no statistic correlates to winning and losing more than turnovers, there’s an easy connection to draw for a player who has won 21 games in four seasons.
Here is the amazing thing about comparing these three players. By the end of 2019, Jameis Winston will have already pocketed $46.2 million from Tampa Bay. Mariota will have made $45.1 million in Tennessee. And Prescott will have been paid roughly $4.7 million by the Cowboys.
That’s right. Dak Prescott has been paid roughly 10.2% of what Jameis Winston has been paid in the NFL. [HR][/HR]
Let’s circle back to our analogy of house shopping. Your choice, should you choose to accept it, is to find a place for your family to live. You want the best deal you can get, but your bigger objective is to make sure your wife and kids aren’t sleeping in your car.
That’s the way it is. You can live in a house or you can hop between hotels and try to beat the system.
I am 95% sure the Titans will eventually pay Marcus Mariota at the going rate despite his clear limitations. Nobody on Earth claims he has worked his way into the conversation of elite signal-callers, but Tennessee is going to pay the going rate for their house. It’s not easy to find new houses.
I think it is closer to 50-60% likely that the Buccanneers lock down Jameis Winston, and I assume almost all of it will be judged on the next six months with Bruce Arians and Winston. But here is the catch: If Winston hits unrestricted free agency in March of 2020 because the Bucs decided to pass, he will be a 26-year old free agent quarterback with first-overall pick pedigree who will demonstrate how the market treats those rare birds. In other words, I will bet you a lunch that he would instantly be courted by many teams who wish to pay him a nine-figure deal. Someone is going to pay the going rate for their Winston house.
This is why I don’t love the figures circulating around a potential Dak Prescott deal. I do suspect it will be finalized before training camp, and I suspect it will unleash the fury of so many on the interweb.
But the Cowboys have looked at the comps in the neighborhood, examined the viability of hotel or tent life, seen what others are paying and decided to settle in for the next few years.
It isn’t that they think Prescott is Staubach, Aikman or even Romo. It’s that they think he is every bit of Mariota, Winston or even Wentz. And they don’t want someone else to buy their house.
They plan on paying the going rate for their QB1, mostly because they have studied the market and know it is a pretty decent bet and partly because living in a cardboard box is not a future they wish to pursue. I highly doubt Marcus Mariota and Jameis Winston’s situations will make you feel better about the Prescott contract, either way. Bu,t at the very least, they’ll offer perspective on what a team must do after investing four or five years in a quarterback who is now in his mid-20s and has proven capable of playing the league’s most important position.
Keep going down the path or go back to the start. Most teams keep going, and only some of them will be happy they did.
That's a perfect way to put it.