There’s a weaselly stat people like to cite that says a team has never won a Super Bowl with a quarterback making X percent of the salary cap, where X is the current market rate for a franchise player. It’s weaselly on a few levels.
One, X is usually sufficiently high enough to exclude several players whose current contracts were market rate when they signed. Two, exactly 12 quarterbacks have won Super Bowls over the last 22 years, which is a comically small sample size even before you consider that five quarterbacks are responsible for 15 of those wins. Three, Patrick Mahomes won this year’s Super Bowl while carrying the NFL’s biggest cap hit, so The Stat isn’t even true anymore. At least, not if it’s framed with any sort of intellectual honesty.
All that being said, the biggest issue with The Stat, however it is framed, is that it does not lead to any actionable conclusion. There might be some doubt about whether a team can win with a quarterback above a certain salary threshold. But there’s no doubt that a team can’t win with a quarterback below a certain talent threshold. In most cases, the option is one or the other. In which case, what exactly are we arguing?
