High QB salaries strain rosters. With Herbert's cap hit soaring, can the Chargers still build a championship contender?
The matchup for Super Bowl LX is final:
The New England Patriots will take on the Seattle Seahawks in a rematch of Super Bowl XLIX in 2015.
The New England Patriots have done what successful NFL franchises have done a lot of in recent history, which is push in on other high-priced talent while their franchise QB is still playing on his rookie contract.
The Seahawks, on the other hand, took a chance on a retread that most teams don't trust to save money for the rest of the roster.
See, the QB market is such that if you are a top 10 QB, you are probably making at least one-sixth of the entire salary cap by yourself after your rookie contract expires. That's a cap that is supposed to fit into it 53 players, and hopefully more than the QB would deserve to be paid like a top 10 player at their position.
It doesn't take a math genius to figure out that it's easier to build the rest of the team when your QB is costing just $9 million against a $295 million cap, especially when other teams are often spending $50 million or more on their starting QB.
The argument that you're going to hear more than once over the next two weeks is this:
In today's NFL, it makes more sense to build a team with a dominant defense and offensive line and make due with a bargain QB.
Sam Darnold's cap hit this year was just $14.4 million. Drake Maye, still on his rookie contract, counted for just $9.9 million against the Patriots' books.
Justin Herbert's cap hit for the upcoming season will be $46.3 million. It jumps to $58.3 million the year after and $71.1 million the year after that. In theory, the salary cap goes up as well, so those numbers become less of a big deal, but...
Trends arrive quickly in the NFL. Jalen Hurts has taken the Eagles to the Super Bowl two of the last three seasons while being the 11th highest paid QB and I think those two things are related. I think that's how they were able to field a dominant defense and offensive line.
Patrick Mahomes is going to count for more than $70 million against the Chiefs caps over the next two seasons and they're coming off a season where they looked like they were going to need to bring in more help. I find it hard to believe the heights of his career success are not behind him.
The highest paid QBs rarely end up in the Super Bowl, not because they don't deserve their money but because it becomes harder to build a complete team with less money.
Herbert's contract goes up every year, a sign that the team thought they could take advantage of the roster flexibility to build around him in the first 3-4 years of the deal before hoping that he would be good enough to carry the offense with lesser talent around him after that. The upcoming season is year 4 of the deal, and the math will only get more difficult from there.