NEWSLETTER
With Brinks trucks being routed to star signal callers across the league this offseason, a new question has been raised. When will Patrick Mahomes get his?
Mahomes still has nine years left on his 12-year, $450 million extension signed in the summer of 2020. But that doesn’t mean that the best quarterback on the planet isn’t due a raise. Especially since everyone in the tiers below him is getting record-setting paydays. And especially because the Chiefs cashed in on another Super Bowl in the first three years of his deal. Not to mention, they rode Mahomes and his hobble ankle to that Super Bowl just three months ago.
When Mahomes signed his current deal with the Chiefs in 2020, his average per year (APY) was $45 million. At the time, that was about $10 million more than ever.
However, we already saw his competitor in the Super Bowl three months ago, Jalen Hurts, top that by plenty. Hurts signed a five-year, $255 million extension last month. Hurts’ deal is worth $51 million per year. Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson’s new five-year, $260 million extension checks in at $52 million annually. That means that Mahomes has fallen $7 million per year behind the highest-paid player in the sport.
We’ve even seen middle-tier quarterbacks like Derek Carr and Daniel Jones sign mega deals this offseason. Considering the amount of money spent on quarterbacks this offseason and the fact that we’ve got at least two more record-setting extensions on the way for Joe Burrow and Justin Herbert, it’s only fitting that the best quarterback in football gets the raise that he deserves.
If you don’t think that Mahomes deserves a new extension on merit alone, then consider this; Mahomes signed his current deal at the heart of the COVID-19 Pandemic. As Mike Florio illustrated in a recent story, Mahomes made concessions allowing the Chiefs to avoid the high APY during the years in which NFL teams would be most impacted by the pandemic.
“In 2020, Mahomes swapped a high APY and a complicated but lucrative guarantee structure for cash flow in the years that were most likely to be affected by the pandemic. Now that those days have come and gone, the cash flow can be boosted in the early years of a revised deal.”
So, not only is Mahomes now grossly underpaid by the market’s standards, he took one for the team — quite literally — the last time they were at the negotiating table.
The question is not if Patrick Mahomes will get a new deal, but when Mahomes will get his new deal.
Chiefs G.M. Brett Veach recently said that the Chiefs intend to work on a new deal with Mahomes. Veach also indicated that they will do so after the Burrow and Herbert deals are done. In my opinion, Veach is willing to break the records for Mahomes as soon as the statistics for Burrow and Herbert are in.
Rightfully so.
Regardless of how the Chiefs get there, they’ve got to make Patrick Mahomes the highest-paid player in the NFL once again.
