More MMQB: The Nine Biggest NFL Draft Story Lines Heading into Combine Week
The Packers are in a tough spot with Aaron Rodgers. And to understand it, I think you have to understand how their perspective on this situation has changed over the past year.
The previous two offseasons, Green Bay’s focus was singular—get Rodgers back in the fold. My sense is that focus was born of Rodgers’s own excellence, the roster’s makeup (very win now), and the uneasiness of Jordan Love’s readiness to take over. It left them waiting Rodgers out for five months in 2021, and giving him an unprecedented contract to play an 18th season in Green Bay, and a 15th season as Packers starter, in ’22.
This year is different. They’re open to moving Rodgers. They have questions on backside-of-their-prime vets such as David Bakhtiari, with some cap issues to work through. And where they were worried about Love’s development a year ago, they’re now seeing a guy capable of starting—at the very least—with considerable upside.
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Now, the problem: The contract Rodgers was able to leverage from the in-the-moment Packers of 2022 stands to hamstring the looking-forward Packers of ’23. Here’s how …
• Rodgers is due $59.52 million this year. It’s fully guaranteed. No one is trading for a quarterback with that number without knowing he’s all in, especially with that quarterback carrying the hammer of a potential retirement with him. So while Rodgers doesn’t have a no-trade clause on paper, as a practical matter, he might as well have one.
• Rodgers has a cap number of $31.62 million for this year, thanks to a contract that runs through 2023, but spreads cap charges through ’26. The trouble with that, of course, is the $40.31 million in dead-cap charges to deal with if they trade Rodgers. Those could be alleviated by waiting until June 1 to trade him, but it’s hard to imagine delaying things until then given the circumstances.
• Because of the $59.52 million he’s guaranteed this year, cutting him is basically out of the question. Doing so would mean taking on a nine-figure dead-cap charge.
So if Rodgers wants to return, the Packers have to do their best to make it work.
If he doesn’t? Because of all of the above, this probably plays out a little like Tom Brady’s situation did in 2020, when the number of boxes that a suitor needs to check (win-now roster, cap space to add players he wants to bring, coach system he wants to work with, city he wants to live and play in, etc.) narrows the field to a very small number of serious candidates. Making it even tougher would be that Green Bay has the control that the Patriots lacked over Brady’s exit, and the Packers will have teams they won’t trade Rodgers to.
Now, all this said, I’d applaud what the Packers did the past couple of years, even if this is the end for Rodgers. As we saw in Tampa Bay, and with what’s happened in New England over the three years since Brady left there, the opportunity that a legendary quarterback creates is impossible to replicate—and just because Green Bay accommodated Rodgers and didn’t get back to the mountaintop doesn’t mean their strategy to keep and build for him was flawed.
So Rodgers’s contractual implications, his control over the situation, and a likely small group of bidders will almost certainly depress his trade value, where the cost could wind up being less than a first-round pick (though owner involvement with some of these teams could change that), whereas last year or the year before, it’d have been much more than that.
And if Rodgers is all in on returning, there’s plenty of merit to just keeping him, too.
There’s nothing imminent between Derek Carr and the Jets, and there’s a reason for that. Carr had a really good visit last Friday night and Saturday with the team’s brass in Jersey, and they left it with this understanding—both parties were going to take their time in making what’s a big decision for each side.
The Jets know that Carr, analytical as can be in how he’s treating his first foray into free agency, is going to visit with other teams and consider all his options. And the Jets, I’m told, let Carr know that they’ll be methodically surveying what’s out there at quarterback, and that first means waiting to see what materializes between Rodgers and the Packers, and then keeping their eyes open about the possibilities for them at the position.
To this point, the good news, is there are options for both parties.
For Carr, the money he’s seeking is a significant factor. He had three years and $116.3 million left on his Raiders deal, or $38.77 million per year. The Raiders couldn’t trade him because no one was willing to inherit that contract (with $32.9 million guaranteed this year and $7.5 million next), and if he’s now asking for $35 million per (ESPN reported he is), it’d stand to reason it might be hard for him to find that. So my guess, based on what the market told us, would be he’ll be a starter somewhere, but at less money than he wants.
As for the Jets, it seems clear that Rodgers (under the right circumstances) would be their first choice, but this isn’t an Aaron-or-bust situation. They’re exploring everything, from Rodgers and Carr, to Ryan Tannehill and Jimmy Garoppolo, to even the idea of bringing Geno Smith back or luring Daniel Jones from across town. Part of it, as I see it, lies in how the quarterback market shakes out, which brings us to our next takeaway …
There’s a lot of gray area in that quarterback market. That’s because there’s no real mid-tier contract level for starting quarterbacks like there is for, say, offensive tackles (deals for Garett Bolles, D.J. Humphries and Terron Armstead), defensive ends (Trey Hendrickson, Carl Lawson, Sam Hubbard) or corners (Carlton Davis, Charvarius Ward).
Instead, paying a quarterback has largely become a yes-or-no question—either you think he’s a franchise guy or you don’t. Here’s how we can best illustrate that …
• There are eight quarterbacks on contracts worth $40 million per year or more. Another five are making between $29 million and $40 million (Kirk Cousins, Jared Goff, Carson Wentz, Matt Ryan and Tannehill), and only Cousins’s contract was done after March 2020—meaning all of those, absent Cousins, were top-of-the-market deals when they were signed. Also, two of the five (Wentz, Ryan) will be cut in the coming weeks, and a third (Tannehill) certainly isn’t on the most solid ground where he’s at.
• After that, the number drops to around $14 million per year, and that’s Jameis Winston (who could be cut), and after that it falls into eight figures.
Add that up, and you have a total of 14 contracts worth more than $10 million, 13 of which are at $29.5 million per year or more. So by the time we get to mid-March, that number could be down to 10 (depending on whether Carr signs), with no one between $10 million and $33.5 million (Goff’s number).
That, ultimately, is a problem for teams looking for that second level, and for the quarterbacks, too, because there certainly could be teams that look at this and say, Would we rather have Baker Mayfield at $10 million per year, or Jones or Carr at $35 million per year?
How that all shakes out for Carr, Jones, Garoppolo and Smith on the high end, and Mayfield, Wentz and Sam Darnold on the low end, remains to be seen. Ten years ago, I can recall where the compromise for teams and quarterbacks such as these were to have solid raw average-per-year numbers but light guarantees (so teams could bail as needed) on deals, and maybe that’s where this all ends up.
What we know now is a lot of quarterbacks are shooting for the moon, with a lot of murkiness on whether they actually land there.
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To that end, the Raiders are going to be an interesting team to watch. Las Vegas coach Josh McDaniels and GM Dave Ziegler did the three-year, $121.5 million extension with Carr last April to essentially make Carr their version of Alex Smith in Kansas City—as a veteran quarterback they could win with, and build around in the moment, and also one who would buy them time to find a younger answer without having to force anything.
We’ve been over the reasons why that didn’t work (they’re there for you, chapter and verse, in the Jan. 2 MMQB, if you’re interested).
And the result of it in 2023, I believe, will be Vegas looking for a cheaper alternative, rather than going down the same road again. Brady would’ve been an option the Raiders would’ve considered. I think they’ll look at Garoppolo, too, given McDaniels and Ziegler’s background with the soon-to-be-former-Niner, but they’ll do so with discipline and restraint, and not be afraid to walk away if the financial ask is too high.
If that doesn’t work out, I’d look for the Raiders to try and bring back Jarrett Stidham (who played well in limited action after Carr’s benching) and find him some competition, maybe with a swing on someone such as Mayfield (McDaniels did a lot of work on the former Heisman winner, predraft in 2018), and then study hard on the quarterbacks that’ll be available to them in the top 10.
The upshot of that idea, of course, is they can then use their cap space (they’re top five in the NFL at close to $50 million as it stands right now) to shore up issues on their offensive line and the middle of their defense, which should give whoever the quarterback is a better shot to have success.
I think it’s a pretty smart approach in an offseason when there’ll be fewer starting jobs open than available quarterbacks with starting experience, and where there might not be as big a difference between the top names on the market and the second tier, despite what could be a pretty massive financial gap between the two groups.
I don’t doubt Brady’s intention is to stay retired in 2023. I don’t see him suddenly running an end-around in mid-March (when he’d be a free agent) to make himself available to San Francisco or Vegas or Miami or whoever else. I also believe, because of his plans and circumstances family-wise—some of which we covered with his dad in the column a couple of weeks ago—there is zero plan to reconsider any of it thereafter.
That said, if I am one of those teams, I’m not slamming the door shut for a couple of reasons.
The first is no one knows how Brady will feel come the first day of training camp, or on opening day, when his body clock tells him it’s time for football season. It stands to reason that internal alarm will ring louder for him than any player ever—consider that there’s an expected first-round receiver (Jaxon Smith-Njigba) this year born after Brady won his first Super Bowl, and you’ll get perspective on that.
The second is simpler. He can still play after throwing for 4,694 yards and 25 touchdowns with a 97.2 passer rating at 45 years old—through a calendar year that was anything but normal on and off the field. It’s also obvious in talking to those who went head-to-head with him through that tumultuous campaign.
“I think it was probably different for him, in that the weapons around him were not as consistent, really everything around him was not as consistent,” said one rival exec. “And in years past, with New England, he had those situations, and still went to the conference championship game. There had to be some decrease somewhere, and that’s really where it was, and he wasn’t able to make up for it like he used to. But it wasn’t the naked-eye stuff. He still threw it really well; his body was still where it needed to be; he moved well in the pocket.
“Maybe he was speeding things up on his own, like he had to compensate for what was going on around him.”
And if, say, this executive was running a ready-made team such as the Niners, would he keep after Brady?
“If I were San Francisco,” he continued, “I’d think about it, for sure.”
Now, again, Brady has said his piece on it, and I think he’s being honest. His actions track with that, too. My understanding is he told Buccaneers folks in the fall that his plan, should he retire, was to take a year off, decompress and study broadcasters before entering the booth and starting the clock on his 10-year, $375 million deal with Fox. So none of what he’s done over the past month hasn’t been haphazard at all—it actually follows the road map he explained to others months ago.
What’s harder to forecast, I’d say, is how he’ll feel when he actually hits the uncharted territory that lies ahead.
Of course, you know that Panthers owner David Tepper’s fingerprints are all over Frank Reich’s staff in Carolina. Really, mostly, it’s Tepper following through on things he’s said publicly about there not being a salary cap for coaches, as we mentioned last week—it’s just that this time around, he’s using his resources to stack the team with brand-name assistant coaches in addition to paying the head coach.
But someone mentioned to me this week that there’s a little more to it than just that.
New rules to reward diverse hires were implemented in 2020, and in the three offseasons since, the Niners have been awarded a staggering eight third-round picks for having guys hired away into head coaching and GM positions. They received three thirds in ’22 for the ’21 hires of Martin Mayhew in Washington and Robert Saleh by the Jets. They got two thirds for this year for last year’s hire of Mike McDaniel in Miami, and they’ll get three more thirds next year for this year’s hires of Ran Carthon in Tennessee and DeMeco Ryans in Houston.
Tepper, I’m told, took note of that. And it was a motivator—in addition to helping the cause of Black coaches—to focus the hiring of Reich’s staff, particularly at the higher levels of it, to diverse candidates with upward mobility. So after the Reich hire, Carolina zeroed in on Denver defensive coordinator Ejiro Evero, who was right there with Vic Fangio as the most sought-after prospective DC league-wide, and Eagles QBs coach Brian Johnson for coordinator jobs.
They landed Evero, couldn’t quite get Johnson (who’s in line to be promoted to offensive coordinator in Philly) but wound up with well-regarded Rams assistant head coach Thomas Brown as OC instead. And, of course, the first reason to write big checks to get those guys is the belief that they’ll be first-class lieutenants for Reich, the way Nick Sirianni and Matt Eberflus were for him in Indianapolis.
From there, well, if they hit the ground running as Tepper and Reich believe they will, then they’d stand to benefit the Panthers well after they’re gone, too.
The Chiefs deserve credit for keeping their pipeline stocked, too. To some degree, it gets taken for granted. But it shouldn’t—Andy Reid’s made what’s actually really hard look simple, in how Kansas City has continuously, and deftly replaced its assistants, and it’s a pretty enormous key in the Chiefs’ run of 10 consecutive winning seasons, and nine double-digit-win seasons, since Reid arrived in 2013 (he’s 117–45 as Chiefs coach).
The Chiefs, by the way, had losing records in five of the six seasons before Reid’s arrival and a composite record of 29–67 during that stretch. So there was a lot of work for Reid to do from the jump, and it started with the depth of the staff he brought with him, which would lead to progressions like these …
• Reid brought Doug Pederson with him from Philly, and hired him as a first-time coordinator in Kansas City. Matt Nagy came from Philly, too, in 2013, to be a first-time quarterbacks coach with the Chiefs. And Reid scooped up Colorado offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, who played for him in Philly in 1999, to be his running backs coach, after the Buffaloes fired Jon Embree’s staff in early 2013. So when Pederson got the Eagles job in ’16, Nagy was ready to replace him. And when Nagy got the Bears job in ’18, Bieniemy had five years in the system under his belt and was ready to roll.
• The plan was for Mike Kafka, drafted by Reid as a quarterback in Philly in 2010, to be next to replace Bieniemy. The timing simply didn’t work on that one—Bieniemy didn’t land a job as fast, the Chiefs could only hold on to Kafka for so long (they promoted him to pass-game coordinator in ’20), and wound up losing him in January ’22. So when Kafka bolted, Reid swooped in to get Nagy back—after the Bears fired him—and that positioned Nagy to replace Bieniemy when Bieniemy left for Washington a week ago. Kafka, by the way, did well enough in his first year with the Giants to land three head-coach interviews in January (he became a finalist for two of those jobs). Nagy, meanwhile, is seen as a potential successor to Reid in Kansas City.
• On the front-office side, when some organizational issues led to the dismissal of John Dorsey, it seemed like the timing was pretty terrible. Dorsey’s No. 2, the Chiefs’ widely respected director of football operations, Chris Ballard, left for the Colts GM job six months earlier. But once again, Reid had answers—and confidence in the team’s young co-directors of player personnel, Brett Veach and Mike Borgonzi. The former was a protégé of Reid’s from Philly, and one of the leading voices in the move up to get Pat Mahomes months earlier, while the latter was an Ivy League–educated holdover from the Scott Pioli regime. So there was no panic or overreaching for help outside the organization. Reid, and the Chiefs, again, trusted their farm system.
• And even on the salary-cap side, after that 2017 front-office makeover cost chief negotiator Trip MacCracken his job, Kansas City had a promising young cap guru, in Brandt Tilis, ready to go.
Add this up—and you could include the development of Matt House under Steve Spagnuolo in it, too, with House now the defensive coordinator at LSU—and I think you’ll see another reason why Kansas City’s creating something teams want to replicate. Of course, it’s not easy to identify the right people, then develop them, at the rate Reid and the Chiefs have done it. Which is one more reason why the two rings they have may just be the start of the story.
(While we’re here, by the way, we’ll have more on Bieniemy and his new job in the MAQB a little later today from Indianapolis.)
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The Rams didn’t go into this offseason looking to move Jalen Ramsey. This, really, was more about the reality that the franchise is facing right now, with the core of players they’ve built around the past few years, and where the next steps are coming. Here’s a snapshot look at that reality.
• Five players on the roster have cap numbers of $20 million or more. Ramsey is the only one of the five who won’t be 30 on opening day, and he turns 29 in October. Those five are on the books for $121 million against the cap this year, or 54% of the team’s cap space. Their cap charges jump to $159.2 million in 2024, with two of the five deals having multiple void years.
• A total of seven players have cap charges of $15 million or more, and the cap for those seven adds up to $154.55 million, which gets you to 69% of the cap.
• Players such as Rob Havenstein, Tyler Higbee and Brian Allen aren’t far behind, adding to the top-heavy construct of the Rams’ roster.
Now, the Rams could continue to push money forward creatively if they wanted to. After all, being able to navigate inside the lines of the cap while stocking a roster with stars got the team to the playoffs in four of Sean McVay’s first five years, to two Super Bowls and, last year, all the way to a championship.
But there’s also got to be a point when the debt they’ve piled up has to be addressed, and when a course for a post–Matthew Stafford/Aaron Donald/Cooper Kupp/Jalen Ramsey world has to be set. And because a lot of the early-adopter advantages the Rams had in using draft picks as capital in the way they did are now gone, this sets up as an interesting time for the organization to pivot.
Because they still have McVay, Stafford, Donald, Kupp and, maybe, Ramsey, I don’t think you’ll see that pivot happen all in one fell swoop. It’ll likely be more gradual than that.
That said, it’s not hard to see a world coming where the Rams get more aggressive in stockpiling higher draft picks, rather than being aggressive in dealing them off. And I think exploring options on what dealing Ramsey could do for them from a cap-and-draft-pick standpoint—the same way they experimented with seeing what picks could do for them on the veteran market a half decade ago—is where all of this begins.
I still think Daniel Snyder sells the Commanders, but I’ve got the same questions on the certainty of it that I presented in my column off the owners meetings in December. At a baseline, there simply aren’t many owners that trust Dan Snyder’s intentions on much of anything, much less something as enormous as selling his franchise. And because of the defiance with which he’s faced all accusations made against him the past three years, the feeling lingers that he could turn back to being from-my-cold-dead-hands Dan on a dime.
The magic number is, and has been, $7 billion. That’s more than a 50% markup on the $4.65 billion the Waltons paid for the Broncos, and if Snyder gets that, there’d be enormous pressure from other owners to sell, because of what it would mean for the value of every team, and Snyder could walk away claiming victory.
If it’s less than that, and most reports from those covering this thing day-to-day say it’s significantly less than that, things will at least be more interesting. Ultimately, I think where Snyder is logistically, and the amount of people wanting him to sell, forces his hand. But, again, this is a guy that can’t be trusted, so it’s really hard to rule anything out.
Here are my quick-hitter takeaways for the week of the combine. And I’ll focus them on things I’ll be looking for in Indianapolis …
• Good job by The Athletic’s Mike Sando, Jayson Jenks and our old colleague Kalyn Kahler on their story on Russell Wilson and the Broncos. I think it highlights, again, that what’s best for Wilson is that he has a coach that can push back against him, like Pete Carroll could, and build a program and system that gets the most out of him, rather than one designed to satiate his own desire to be Tom Brady or Peyton Manning. Wilson definitely has such a coach now.
• Speaking of Sean Payton, the amount of experience on his staff is pretty notable. DC Vance Joseph has five years of coordinating experience with two teams, OC Joe Lombardi has four years of coordinating experience with two teams and special teams coordinator Ben Kotwica has eight years of coordinating experiences with three teams. Add assistant head coach Mike Westhoff’s 29 years as a special teams coordinator with three teams, and you can see that Payton wanted a staff that could hit the ground running.
• I’ve heard Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would be as interested, if not more so, in buying the Seahawks than the Commanders. So if Snyder’s set on boxing Bezos out of Washington, that certainly wouldn’t end the shot that Bezos becomes an NFL owner, as so many other NFL owners would like him to be.
• Last year, the Commanders didn’t plan to take a quarterback in the draft, and only wound up grabbing Sam Howell in the fifth round because, at that point, his grade was so much higher than that of anyone else left on their board. So when considering him as a likely starter, know that Washington never really saw him as a fifth-rounder in the first place. That said, I’d expect the Commanders, who pick 16th, to study the quarterbacks hard.
• The Bengals are going to get inquiries on Tee Higgins for the same reason the Titans, 49ers, Commanders and Seahawks did on their young receivers last year—Higgins is going into a contract year and will be expensive to keep. Compounding the problem for Cincinnati is that Ja’Marr Chase will be eligible for a new deal next year. So the question, to me, isn’t if you want Higgins on your team (you do). It’s whether you can sign him. And if you can’t, you would be better off with Jordan Addison, Jaxon Smith-Njigba or Quentin Johnston, with the pick you’d get in a trade, for the length of a rookie deal than Higgins for one more year.
• Bobby Wagner’s clearly not what he was, but still has something to offer in terms of leadership and championship experience for a team that’s young in its front seven. I’d wonder out loud about the Eagles’ potential interest. T.J. Edwards is a free agent, as are Fletcher Cox, Brandon Graham and Javon Hargrave, so if Wagner comes affordable, he could be a nice insurance policy and veteran presence for a group in transition.
• Interesting seeing The Washington Post’s report of Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta throwing his hat in the ring for the Commanders. I’d think his experience running casinos, given the league’s going all in on gambling, would be seen as a plus among owners.
• Hard not to feel bad for Dolphins CB Byron Jones, whose tweets over the weekend came from a place a lot of players have been—the place where the league has chewed you up, spit you out and may no longer have any use for you. The lesson for the rest of us? Never blame a player for making every dollar he can while he still can, because the loyalty these guys are asked to show to their teams stops being reciprocated pretty quickly.
• Love the A.J. McCarron story. In case you missed it, McCarron explained after his first game as the St. Louis BattleHawks QB, that he decided to go to the XFL, over being an NFL backup, so his kids could see him play, even though being in the NFL would be more lucrative. I’d bet that’s a decision he won’t wind up regretting.
• I’m gonna be very interested to see how Kyler Murray handles this offseason. Through four NFL seasons, he hasn’t yet been through a full offseason program, earlier in his career because of COVID-19 rules, and more recently because he opted to do his work in Texas. This year, he’ll have a new system to learn, and because of his ACL rehab he won’t be afforded on-field reps to do it. So classroom time with new Cardinals OC Drew Petzing figures to be really important. Which means he should be with Petzing from Day 1 of the offseason program. We’ll see whether he is or not.
Watch the NFL Combine: February streaming schedule here.
One thing you need to know
We’ll have my MAQB coming this afternoon. And in the four days after that, I’ll be pumping out a late-afternoon column in a similar format from Indy, to pass along what I’m hearing from the ground at the combine.
So make sure to keep it locked with us through one of the busiest weeks on the NFL calendar—we’ve got plenty coming for you.
