The big story of the first few weeks of NFL training camp has been the massive new deals for franchise quarterbacks.
After Trevor Lawrence signed a five-year, $275 million contract with the Jaguars in June, Tua Tagovailoa inked a four-year, $212.4 million pact with the Dolphins, and Jordan Love followed with a four-year, $220 million extension in Green Bay. That's more than $700 million on paper to three quarterbacks who have won a total of two playoff games.
I don't love using playoff success as the sole barometer of quarterback play, but there's a realistic conversation to be had here. Since the league moved to its slotted draft system in 2011, we know quarterbacks on rookie contracts have become the most popular roster-building philosophy across the NFL. Draft a quarterback, pay him a fraction of what veteran quarterbacks are making for three to five years, use the savings to surround that young passer with talent and open up a championship window. Draft the right guy -- as the Texans did with C.J. Stroud last year -- and a franchise can be transformed overnight.
There are various factors impacting the three new members of the Second Contract Club and why they didn't make deep playoff runs on their rookie deals. Love was stuck behind Aaron Rodgers. Tagovailoa dealt with injuries, including a concussion that cost him a chance to play during the 2022 playoffs. Lawrence had to overcome former coach Urban Meyer and struggled through the second half of last season while playing through his own ailments.
At the same time, there's a tough question to be asked. The Dolphins, as an example, didn't win a playoff game while Tagovailoa was making about $7.5 million per year. How will they manage to make a deep run into February with him making more than $53 million per season, more than seven times his prior average annual salary? How will the Jags pull that off with Lawrence's salary more than quintupling to $55 million per year?
I'm here to try to answer those questions and provide some best practices. What does the blueprint for winning a title with a quarterback on a second contract look like? It's easier to visualize for a quarterback such as Patrick Mahomes, of course, but what have the Chiefs done to make their path easier? How does a team win once its quarterback gets much more expensive?
Before we start on the tips, let's put those raises into context. To break down how to build a roster with a more expensive quarterback, we have to understand how those contracts work.
Jump to a section:
The second contract impact comes early
When is a quarterback actually 'essential?'
Franchises can't pay everyone ... right?
Who are the players teams can live without?
Why teams should be willing to move on
The value of keeping your own draft picks
Where could players on rookie deals thrive?
The future, and what we should learn
The financial myths (and realities) of a second-contract quarterback
Reality No. 1: This isn't a literal swap of money from one position to another.
Tagovailoa getting a raise from $7.5 million to $53.1 million annually doesn't mean the Dolphins need to take $45.6 million off their books in the months to come. For one, he was about to play out his fifth-year option, so he was already accounting for a base salary of just over $23 million on Miami's cap.
The NFL's salary cap isn't similar to the NBA's, where the money reported on a player's deal is usually a good representation of what he'll cost and what space a team needs to acquire that player. (I won't get into Bird Rights, midlevel exceptions and every other quirk of the NBA cap here.) If a team wants to trade for LeBron James and the future Hall of Famer is making $50 million per year, it generally needs to have a ton of cap space or send out players making that much in return.
The NFL's cap is much fuzzier for a few reasons. Deals often aren't fully guaranteed. The actual cap number itself is determined by several factors, including how much money in cap space a team rolled over from the prior season. And the structure and cap impact of NFL deals, especially larger ones, is influenced by how they're paid with bonuses and base salaries.
Base salaries are accounted for on that year's cap, but a signing bonus is paid up front and then spread over as many as five years on a player's deal. In doing so, a team can pay out a significant amount of money while keeping the cap responsibility for that player's deal relatively modest. As an example, the Dolphins gave Tagovailoa a $42 million signing bonus on his new deal and spread that over five years (his already existing fifth-year option and four new years from the extension). They reduced his base salary to $1.125 million, so while he will take home $43.125 million this year, he'll count for $9.5 million on the 2024 cap.
As a result, the sheer amount of cap space available to a team in this situation doesn't matter all that much when it comes to initiating and managing a second quarterback deal. Teams can use conversions to turn base salaries into bonuses, creating short-term cap space. Franchises don't want to do that with every contract under the cap, but since quarterbacks have such large base salaries, they're often the first players asked to restructure their deals. Patrick Mahomes, as an example, converted $27 million of his deal this year into a bonus, freeing up nearly $22 million of cap space in the process. It's no sweat off his back, given he gets his money up front as opposed to week to week during the season, but it's a logical place for the Chiefs to start their offseason accounting.
The only problem with doing this is dealing with the consequences if things go wrong and a team has to move on from the quarterback. All that money it actually paid the player in bonuses but hasn't yet accounted for on its cap comes due in terms of dead money, which takes away cap space. When the Eagles traded Carson Wentz after the 2020 season, they were stuck with $33.8 million in dead money on their 2021 cap. The Broncos are on the hook for $85 million in dead money after their failed trade for Russell Wilson, a combination of both accelerated dead bonus money and guaranteed base salary the team owes Wilson in 2025.
It's easy to build a deal that has low cap figures and plenty of opportunities to restructure. It's also no heroic act from a quarterback to repeatedly restructure that deal, given it just means he's getting paid up front. Those contracts aren't inherently good or bad, but the structures of those deals in the context of how the broader team is being built can help push them in one direction or the other.
Cash and the way owners are willing to parse it out each year also impacts these deals. No team is going to let a superstar quarterback leave in free agency just so it can save money, but every organization operates within some semblance of a budget for player spending. Adding tens of millions of dollars per year in cash spending on a quarterback limits what general managers can spend elsewhere on their roster. Even with a large signing bonus, the base salaries for quarterbacks are significant and impactful.
Dan Orlovsky discusses expectations for Jordan Love after agreeing to a 4-year, $200M deal with the Packers.
There are a handful of no-brainer contracts out there, but working with anything below that tier of quarterbacks creates question marks. Ideally, a team wants to sign as many players as possible whose deals generate surplus value for the team. Brock Purdy making $1 million per year when he's been playing like a quarterback on the level of Lawrence (who just got $55 million per year) generates a massive amount of surplus value for the 49ers each season. Even passable quarterbacks on rookie deals are significantly valuable; landing someone as good as Daniel Jones ($40 million per season) on a rookie contract south of $10 million per year is a significant victory in a vacuum.
Teams shouldn't cut their veteran quarterbacks just to create surplus value, but it's almost impossible for a quarterback like Lawrence to generate that sort of savings on a second contract. He would have to play at an MVP level over the next few years, and while that's not impossible, it's a much higher standard. In this case, with a team's quarterback no longer delivering surplus value as he gets off his rookie deal, the front office needs to shift and find those valuable contracts elsewhere on the roster.
Reality No. 2: The impact of the second contract comes before it's ever signed.
Nearly 15 years into the slotted draft era, teams, players and representatives are hyper-aware of how quarterback deals impact the roster. The negotiations and roster shifts that happen used to take place after the big second contract was signed. Now, having taken some of the suggestions we'll include below to heart, teams are making decisions about what to do with their rosters before the ink on those deals has even been put to paper. And players are reacting accordingly.
Take the Dolphins, who surely knew in the spring they were going to sign Tagovailoa to an extension before the start of the season. While he has been on a rookie deal, Miami has loaded up on veterans over the past few seasons, as it traded for Tyreek Hill, Bradley Chubb and Jalen Ramsey while adding Terron Armstead in free agency.
Even before Tagovailoa signed his deal, the Dolphins changed their tactics this offseason. The two biggest contracts signed by non-quarterbacks this offseason were both homegrown Miami players. Defensive tackle Christian Wilkins signed a four-year, $110 million deal with the Raiders, while guard Robert Hunt joined the Panthers for five years and $100 million. It's possible the Dolphins didn't see either player as good value at those prices, but realistically, they would have struggled to compete with those deals given what was heading to Tagovailoa. (Note that the two teams acquiring those former Dolphins rank in the bottom quarter of the league in cash spending on quarterbacks this year.)
That impacts the player side, too. One example is the 49ers, who are expected to offer a massive extension to Purdy next year. He isn't eligible for a new deal until the season is over, but everyone in and around the 49ers has to be aware of what's on the way. Unless the 49ers shock everyone and decide to stay with cheaper options at quarterback, Purdy is going to cost a lot more in 2025 and beyond.
The people I mentioned in that column who might be trade or cut candidates to help free up some of the cash and cap needed for a Purdy deal aren't naive to what's coming, and they're trying to get ahead of the pack. Brandon Aiyuk is an unrestricted free agent after the season, so while he would already be looking for a new contract, the pending Purdy deal puts even more pressure on him to get paid before his quarterback starts occupying 20% or more of the salary cap.
An even more obvious example would be the uncertain situation surrounding star left tackle Trent Williams, who is holding out from 49ers camp. While Williams still has three years and more than $77 million remaining on the contract he signed in 2021, none of that money is guaranteed. His 2024 base salary would become guaranteed if he's on the roster in Week 1, but it's entirely possible the 49ers would cut or trade Williams after the season to help create room for Purdy. Williams is holding out now to avoid being placed in that situation. Players rarely hold out or threaten to do so with three years left on their deals, but with Williams at age 37 and still playing at a high level, you can understand why he feels the need to get his future locked up before Purdy gets paid.
All of this leaves general manager John Lynch in a nearly impossible bind. San Francisco's best chance of winning a title with Purdy in 2024, naturally, is with Aiyuk and Williams happy and present on game day. Giving those players guarantees into 2025, however, would eliminates two of the most obvious places the 49ers could look to save money after Purdy's deal. Will they let Dre Greenlaw and Talanoa Hufanga leave in free agency? Will they trade Deebo Samuel instead? Will Lynch run the risk of retaining flexibility and dare Williams to sit out the season?
Reality No. 3: So many 'essential' quarterbacks have signed second deals and struggled to lead their teams to new heights.
While I've written about the idea of trading away or moving on from a quarterback at the end of his rookie deal to stay with a cheaper option at the position and still sprinkle money elsewhere throughout the roster, it's always going to be much easier in practice than reality. Franchises can go decades without landing a talented young quarterback worthy of a significant contract. Letting the most important player on a roster walk out the door isn't for the faint of heart. Even when a team does it and wins the deal, as Pete Carroll did in Seattle with Wilson, a coach might still get fired. Being willing to believe in the unknown at quarterback is a risk few teams are willing to even consider, let alone take.
At the same time, it's also clear organizations that sign the quarterbacks they've built around to second deals have struggled to master the transition. Since that 2011 shift to the slotted draft format changed the way NFL teams were built, the only quarterback to sign a second contract and win the Super Bowl is Mahomes. Three Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks (Mahomes, Wilson and Joe Flacco) were on rookie deals. Nick Foles was a backup behind Wentz, who was also on a rookie pact. The other champions were veterans who were well past their second deals in Tom Brady, Peyton Manning and Matthew Stafford. (Eli Manning also won a Super Bowl in 2011, but he was on a second deal that was signed before the league moved to its new rules.)
Most of the quarterbacks who signed a second contract with the team that developed and built a roster around him hasn't been able to make it further in the playoffs than he did on his rookie deal. Twenty-one quarterbacks inked a second contract between 2011 and 2023. While the jury is obviously still out on the passers who have signed more recently, just three of those 21 made a deeper playoff run after signing their extension. Cam Newton and Matt Ryan lost in the Super Bowl, while Ryan Tannehill was injured and unable to suit up for a wild-card round loss:
As mentioned earlier, I don't typically use playoff success to gauge a quarterback's individual ability, but that's not what we're measuring here. We're considering a franchise's ability to build a Super Bowl-winning roster around its quarterback, and that certainly seems to be more difficult once a passer's contract gets expensive, even if he's a great player. Wilson, for example, was a fantastic quarterback for his time in Seattle, but after making two Super Bowls on his rookie deal, the Seahawks didn't come close to making it back.
Veterans on their third (or later) deals have won Super Bowls in this era, so I'm not suggesting teams with quarterbacks making significant money have no hope of claiming hardware. That transition from rookie deal to second contract and how teams adjust their roster, though, has proved particularly tricky. That's what we're going to focus on now. How can teams ace that adjustment and stay in contention?
How to give a quarterback a second contract and keep competing along the way
Tip No. 1: Accept that you can't pay everyone.
Given that this isn't the NBA and teams can perennially restructure deals to create short-term cap space, one simple solution is to carve out that cap room every year, convert every player's base salary to a signing bonus, and keep pushing the cap hits into the future with extensions and void years. Just about every competitive team in the league restructures at least one or two deals a season to help create short-term cap space when needed.
Could this work? In the short term, maybe. The Buccaneers weren't a team that often restructured deals and generally kept their cap flexible and healthy, but after they signed Brady in 2020, they were aggressive in using bonuses and conversions to create short-term cap space. And naturally, for a team that was in a short-term, win-now window, that made sense. It worked when they won Super Bowl LV, and when they ate their cap vegetables and fell back to earth in 2023, they still managed to pull out an unexpected division title with Baker Mayfield at the helm.
For more than a year or so, though, I'm not sure this is a great strategy, if only because teams will fall on more land mines than you think. Those restructures sound great when a team is creating room with players it thinks will be part of its core for years to come, but NFL careers can be tricky.
The Eagles were one of the league's most aggressive teams at trying to keep just about everybody around (and/or adding players on expensive deals) after Wentz signed his second contract with the team in 2019. It didn't work out. By 2020, contracts for Alshon Jeffery, DeSean Jackson and Malik Jackson were badly underwater (where the players were being paid more than they would be worth on the open market). Wentz went from Philadelphia's long-term franchise quarterback to a pariah in a matter of four months. The Eagles had to trade him and eat nearly $64 million in dead cap the next year to reset their roster, although, like the Bucs, they also managed an unexpected playoff berth when Jalen Hurts improved in 2021.
Dan Orlovsky joins "The Pat McAfee Show" and breaks down why he thinks Trevor Lawrence hasn't done enough so far to warrant his $55 million salary with the Jags.
The most significant example of this philosophy would be the Saints. While you can quibble with some of the choices they made, you can understand being all-in at the end of Drew Brees' career and maximizing short-term cap space at the expense of money down the line. No team was more aggressive with restructuring deals than New Orleans, and if not for a terrible missed pass interference call in the 2018 NFC Championship Game, maybe it would have paid off with a second ring for Brees.
Instead, because the Saints were so remarkably aggressive during the Brees era and restructured deals over and over again, they've been left with a series of underwater contracts. Players who were building blocks have either disappointed (Alvin Kamara, Cameron Jordan) or had their careers irreparably altered by injuries (Ryan Ramczyk, Michael Thomas). The Saints can still pull that restructure lever long enough to sign someone like Derek Carr, but they've been locked into bad deals and repeated restructures just to get under the cap every year.
Pursuing this path with a quarterback on a second deal just isn't realistic. No team wants to lose essential contributors for free -- and I'm not arguing franchises should let every expensive player go -- but there has to be a balance. The restructure-everybody lever is a once-per-generation tactic, not a yearly solution.
Tip No. 2: Figure out whom you can't live without.
To that end, teams have to identify the players they absolutely, utterly cannot replace in any way if they were to go somewhere else. That's typically a smaller group for any team than it might seem at first glance. While the decision-makers obviously don't go to Vegas to get a barometer on how valuable their key players are to their roster, a good thing to keep in mind is just how rare it is that an absent player would materially impact the line in a matchup between two teams. After quarterbacks, even good teams might have only one or two players who would cause a line to shift by even a point in the other side's direction if they were injured and unavailable.
For the Chiefs, that core of irreplaceable players seems clear. In terms of homegrown talent, it's Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Chris Jones. General manager Brett Veach also has another significant free agent addition on the roster in Joe Thuney, who might be the fourth. That's a small group, but those are the absolute essentials the Chiefs are willing to pay a premium, relative to their positions, to keep.
And after that, as we've seen, Veach is willing to be very aggressive in letting stars leave. He traded away Tyreek Hill. Tyrann Mathieu left in free agency and was replaced by a younger option on a cheaper contract in Justin Reid. Frank Clark was released. The Chiefs traded for Orlando Brown Jr. and then let him go before signing Jawaan Taylor as a replacement. And after a career year in 2023, knowing that they wanted to keep Jones on the roster, they traded L'Jarius Sneed to the Titans for a Day 2 pick.
The other classic example of this would be the Bill Belichick era in New England. There were different versions of those rosters across two decades, but the Pats had few players they insisted on keeping. They generally didn't budge at left tackle until necessary, although they eventually let Nate Solder leave in free agency at a ridiculous price when the Giants went over the top for him in 2018. The first few titles in the dynasty were built around essentials such as Matt Light, Richard Seymour, Ty Law and later Vince Wilfork. On the back end, it was Rob Gronkowski, Devin McCourty and Stephon Gilmore.
Belichick was happy to deal away or move on from just about anybody else on that roster during the Brady era. Of course, when the players above were no longer deemed essential by him, he dealt those previously untouchable standouts away, too. That leads to another way to help keep the spark alive for a roster ...
Tip No. 3: Be willing to move on from players if you can replenish your roster.
It's better to get something than nothing. Teams get a compensatory pick if they lose a player in free agency, but that pick comes at the end of the given round, doesn't show up for a full year after the signing and potentially can be canceled out if the team losing a player then signs a free agent to replace that lost production. Although the Patriots landed Brady with a comp pick in 2000, teams generally realize better returns by trading players they're expecting to leave for more significant draft capital.
Sometimes, that means losing a player who continues to play well elsewhere. The Chiefs traded Hill to the Dolphins two years ago, and the veteran has responded with two of the best seasons we've ever seen from a wideout. The Chiefs have won the Super Bowl in each of those two seasons, even without great play at wide receiver. Trading Hill gave Kansas City a pick it would eventually use as the basis for adding young cornerback Trent McDuffie, while the extra cash and cap space that didn't go to Hill were spread elsewhere around the roster. If the Chiefs had re-signed Hill, maybe they wouldn't have been able to afford to add Donovan Smith and Taylor to man the tackle spots last season.
The ultimate example of this philosophy, again, is New England during the Belichick era. The Patriots traded everyone from Seymour to Logan Mankins to Randy Moss to Chandler Jones. Some of those trades didn't pan out in terms of what the Pats eventually landed in the draft, but the Seymour trade netted them Solder. The Jones trade landed them Thuney and Malcolm Mitchell, who had 70 receiving yards in the Super Bowl comeback win over the Falcons before his career was waylaid by injuries. In earlier times, the Deion Branch trade became Brandon Meriweather, and the second-rounder they received for Matt Cassel turned into Patrick Chung.
Trading those players feels like a catastrophic blow to a team -- and it can sometimes be a mistake -- but it's shortsighted to compare a veteran to a rookie in a straight-up swap. It wasn't, for example, Hill vs. Skyy Moore. It's Hill versus whatever picks the Chiefs landed for him in a trade and the cash they could repurpose elsewhere on the roster by virtue of replacing Hill with cost-controlled players for the next several years.
Tip No. 4: Treasure your draft picks and try to get more of them.
I know what Rams general manager Les Snead's shirt said about draft picks, but every consistently successful franchise over an extended period of time gets there by drafting and developing talent. (Snead's shirt was more tongue-in-cheek than really reflective of Los Angeles' philosophy; keep in mind that its best players on the field that day in Super Bowl LVI were first-round pick Aaron Donald and third-rounder Cooper Kupp.) When teams are close to a Super Bowl, they tend to lean more aggressively toward using draft picks to try to find that final piece of the puzzle with a veteran addition.
That worked for the Rams when they added Von Miller, but there are plenty of teams that have gone over the top with a trade or a significant free agent signing to try to make that last key addition and then regretted doing so. One example is the massive contract the Bills handed the very same Miller the offseason after his Super Bowl win in Los Angeles. If you want to pick a trade, Philly's 2020 move for Darius Slay landed the Eagles the No. 1 cornerback they wanted, and Slay has played well in green. It still didn't matter for that 2020 team, though, because it wasn't just one player away after all.
The Chiefs, Patriots and even the Manning-era Giants have shown that adding young players to a roster can be the thing that takes a franchise over the top. Nine of the 22 players who lined up for at least half of the snaps on offense or defense for the Chiefs in Super Bowl LVIII were on rookie deals. And although the 49ers were unlucky to battle injuries, the experienced veterans forced into meaningful roles on their roster in the big game -- Logan Ryan and Oren Burks -- were found wanting in key moments.
When a team pays its quarterback $50 million or more per season, it has to cut back elsewhere. It can't spend as much on free agents elsewhere on its roster to step in as immediate starters at positions it doesn't have filled. The organization doesn't have to sit out free agency altogether -- we've seen the Chiefs adding players such as Justin Reid and Jawaan Taylor recently -- but it can't rely on having free agent additions starting at all levels of its roster in the way it might with a quarterback on a rookie deal.
As a result, when a roster shifts after that rookie quarterback contract, it can head in one of two directions. One is to sign less expensive veterans in free agency and hope it gets the same results it did with players on more lucrative deals. Although every team is going to have a veteran or two in reserve roles on its roster -- the Chiefs managed to find a reasonably useful left tackle on a modest deal in Donovan Smith last year -- this isn't a great way to build a significant portion of a starting lineup. These guys are generally low-reward options, because of their age, their injury history or their recent level of play.
The other direction is to acquire cost-controlled players in the draft and trust the front office can land enough starters to make that path worthwhile. There's virtually no chance a team will find a veteran it's paying $2 million per season who produces at a level closer to guys making $20 million per year. If it does, it's a one-season anomaly, because that player will rightfully get a bigger deal in free agency the next year.
Finding that sort of surplus value happens all of the time in the draft, though. Even leaving the first round aside, Joey Porter Jr., Sam LaPorta, Tank Dell, Kobie Turner and Puka Nacua were immediate standouts on rookie deals in 2023. Even better, their respective teams have those players around for a minimum of two more cost-controlled seasons in the years ahead, and those guys are heading toward their peak, whereas most free agents are exiting theirs by the end of their deals.
Of course, planning out a strategy and preparing for it with draft picks doesn't always work. The Bengals used free agency to build out their defense while they enjoyed the fruits of Joe Burrow, Ja'Marr Chase and Tee Higgins on rookie deals. Knowing Burrow was about to get paid, they started using their picks to replenish their defense. They let Jessie Bates and Vonn Bell leave in free agency a year ago and replaced them with 2022 first-rounder Dax Hill and veteran Nick Scott, one of the lower-cost veteran replacements I mentioned earlier. They used a 2023 first-rounder on Myles Murphy, who was a natural long-term successor to Trey Hendrickson or Bengals product Sam Hubbard on the edge. Second-rounder DJ Turner was considered the replacement for pending free agent Chidobe Awuzie.
Those moves haven't worked out. Hill and Scott struggled, Murphy had three sacks in a reserve role as a rookie, and the defense fell apart last season. Cincinnati had to go back to the well at safety, re-signing Bell after he was cut by the Panthers and adding Geno Stone from the Ravens while cutting Scott and moving Hill to cornerback. The Bengals planned things the right way and had a clear long-term vision, but their succession plan on defense hasn't worked out so far.
For the Chiefs, on the other hand, things have been more successful. Nick Bolton and Willie Gay have been upgrades on the veterans they replaced, most notably Anthony Hitchens. George Karlaftis has been more consistent than Clark. Sneed and McDuffie have been immensely productive on rookie deals at cornerback. Felix Anudike-Uzomah didn't show much as a rookie first-rounder a year ago, but you get the idea. Around Jones, the Chiefs have gone young on defense and still managed to thrive on that side of the football.
Last year's Chiefs defense was the best Mahomes has played with as a pro. Kansas City pulled that off despite fielding the league's second-youngest defense on a snap-weighted age basis during the regular season. On the whole, the Chiefs were the seventh-youngest team in all of football. They were a second-half comeback away from facing the Lions, the league's fifth-youngest team, in the Super Bowl. Every year won't be this way, but if a team plays its cards right, 2023 is proof it can thrive while building a young, talented roster around its quarterback as opposed to keeping as many familiar faces in the building as possible.
"Pick good players" would be a great philosophy if anybody were good at it, but front offices can control how they choose to construct their roster. Going after players in the draft is going to be cheaper and offer more upside than all but the best free agents. And although the draft can be risky, the hit rate on veteran free agents is much lower than you think. Go back three years and 15 of the top 20 free agents signed are no longer with the teams that added them. William Jackson, Bud Dupree, Kenny Golladay, Carl Lawson and Ronald Darby were barely productive in their new locales.
Organizations can follow the strategy by holding on to their selections, but that's probably not enough. Nobody is arguing teams should turn their first-round pick into 25 seventh-round selections, but adding young, cost-controlled talent with upside to a roster is absolutely essential. Since no team can consistently win when it comes to picking players, getting as many chances as possible to add those players in the earlier rounds of the draft is the clearest path to creating value throughout a roster.
Trading down, adding compensatory picks and/or landing top-100 selections by dealing players who would have otherwise left in free agency is critical to sustainable rosters. Under Belichick, the Patriots were spectacular in taking advantage of teams that didn't know what they were doing. Despite being in a near-20-year window of contention around Brady, Belichick repeatedly traded down and won deals with teams that were convinced they needed to add a veteran off his roster or a player who had fallen on their board. Belichick wasn't any better at picking players than other executives, but by playing the long game with picks and getting more shots on net than anybody else, he was able to build a dynasty around Brady.
Tip No. 5: Find places where you're comfortable cycling players through the lineup on rookie deals.
This goes back to the Peyton Manning-era Colts and Bill Polian, who also competed with a very expensive quarterback for a decade. More than maybe any other franchise in the league at that time besides the Cowboys, the Colts were a team of haves and have-nots. They were going to spend heavily on a core of between eight and 10 stars, many at critical positions, and build the rest of the roster around draft picks on rookie deals.
As a result, Polian and the Colts had no choice but to let talented players at the positions they didn't value leave in free agency while trusting that they could find answers when they left. For Indy, that was at guard, on the interior of its defensive line, at off-ball linebacker and at cornerback. The core shifted over time; the Colts didn't value safety as much early in the Tony Dungy run but then paid Bob Sanders a record deal in 2007, and after initially giving Edgerrin James an extension in 2006, they let him go and replaced the star back with draft picks Joseph Addai and Donald Brown.
For his Patriots teams, Belichick was generally comfortable going with lower-cost or draft-first options at running back, center, edge rusher and most notably cornerback. During the Mahomes/Reid era, the Chiefs have stayed with cost-effective solutions at halfback and cornerback. They've been willing to draft and develop interior linemen, with Thuney as a notable exception, and they've alternated between spending big money on edge rushers and defensive tackles.
Ideally, teams want to align the positions where they save money with elements of football where they think they have a good developmental system. The Ravens have historically done an excellent job of drafting and developing interior offensive linemen, so while they held on to Marshal Yanda for many years, they were comfortable letting standouts Ryan Jensen and Kelechi Osemele leave in order to spend money elsewhere. Likewise, they held faith on the edge and didn't match big offers for Za'Darius Smith and Matthew Judon. While those players had success elsewhere, Baltimore was able to find players who filled key roles elsewhere on the roster.
There's no right roster construction to hit here, no foolproof plan of positions to spend money targeting and others to avoid. For all the teams and positions I mentioned above, there were exceptions. The Patriots traded for and then paid Corey Dillon. They signed Stephon Gilmore in free agency. The Colts gave Sanders a huge contract. Baltimore kept re-signing Yanda. Nothing should be set in stone, and great organizations adapt to what's available, but having a long-term vision and philosophy about which positions you're going to prioritize is a logical way to build a sustainable roster.
Tip No. 6: Get lucky.
Oh, there's that one, too. Getting lucky might not be sustainable or actionable when it comes to building out a roster, but it sure goes a long way.
Luck manifests itself in a lot of ways around the NFL. You could argue the Chiefs were lucky Greenlaw tore his Achilles as he was about to run on the field in the Super Bowl, creating a hole in the lineup the 49ers weren't prepared to fill. The replay timeout the Chiefs had before a critical third-down play in the prior Super Bowl against the Niners might have given Mahomes time to ask Eric Bieniemy to run Wasp, which produced a tide-turning completion. Heck, if the Saints had called up the Bengals in April 2017, they might have been able to jump Kansas City's trade up the board to grab Mahomes in the first place.
Sometimes, luck is not getting what you want. When the Bills won the bidding to sign Miller in free agency during the 2022 offseason, the Rams transitioned and went after Allen Robinson. The Eagles were about to sign the veteran wideout, but when he left them at the altar and joined the Rams, Howie Roseman's Plan B was to trade for A.J. Brown. The Cowboys tried to draft Paxton Lynch and Connor Cook in 2016 before settling for Dak Prescott. Teams can't re-create those decisions going right, but it's sure nice to have them work out.
What could happen next?
It's worth remembering we're still working with a relatively small sample of teams that have actually won and tried to win in this era. This will be the 14th season since the league changed to the slotted draft system, and much of that stretch has been dominated by two teams. It's too simplistic to place that on the presence of Brady and Mahomes given how other successful quarterbacks have struggled to come close, but they're obviously the most important factors here. We've seen teams with quarterbacks such as Brad Johnson and Trent Dilfer win Super Bowls, but that was another era.
In another 15 years, we might see franchises look at second contracts for anything short of elite quarterbacks as bad financial decisions and construct their rosters accordingly. The comparison that comes to mind is something like the NBA, where the midrange game has disappeared and scoring attempts almost entirely consist of 3-pointers and high-percentage shots in the paint.
At quarterback, if the league continues to struggle building title-winning teams around players on second contracts who aren't Mahomes, the NFL might shift toward a model where the quarterback market is polarized further. We could see the league split into teams with quarterbacks on rookie deals, and only future Hall of Fame quarterbacks would land second deals earning more than 20% of the salary cap. In that universe, Tagovailoa, Lawrence and Kyler Murray might find themselves stuck with one-year deals for the handful of teams in no-man's-land. Teams have been loath to move on from even average quarterback play without an alternative, but if the expensive middle class at quarterback doesn't produce more titles, smart teams will adapt accordingly.