Jared Goff helped lift Lions to new heights, but paying him will make it tougher to win

You need a good quarterback to win in the NFL. You have to pay a good quarterback market value to keep him around. It becomes a lot harder to win once you pay that quarterback market value.

That’s the conundrum all NFL teams face. There is three decades of history that indicates your quarterback better not make more than 13% of the cap, or be Patrick Mahomes, if you want to win a Super Bowl.

Jared Goff signed a $212 million deal over four years on Monday, with $170 million guaranteed. It was an awesome story: A player who was dumped by the Los Angeles Rams for something better becoming one of the highest paid players in NFL history. Goff was a supposed throw-in for the Matthew Stafford trade but he has been way more than that. He helped the Lions to their most successful offseason since 1957 and had fans chanting his name.

But the issue is that Goff’s mega-deal will make it harder for the Lions to keep winning, if history is any guide.

Jared Goff got a massive contract

You’ll hear the axiom that you need an elite quarterback to win big in the NFL, and while that’s not completely accurate, it should read that you need an elite quarterback who isn’t making too much of the team’s salary cap.

From the start of the salary cap era in 1994 until Patrick Mahomes’ second Super Bowl win, the magic number was 13.1%. Steve Young made 13.1% of the 1994 San Francisco 49ers’ salary cap when they won the Super Bowl. Every single Super Bowl winning quarterback after that, until Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Philadelphia Eagles two seasons ago, was under that 13.1% mark according to OverTheCap and Spotrac.

It’s pretty easy to figure out: When one player is taking up that much of the salary cap, it’s hard to build a championship level team around him.

Jared Goff is the second highest paid player in NFL history, in terms of average per year. (Photo by Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images)

The specific details of Goff’s deal weren’t in as of Tuesday morning, but a deal worth $53 million…

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Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-05-14 15:38:32

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