Patrick Mahomes Secures the Bag and Sets Up a Potential Dynasty

You know those parmesan bread bites from Dominos? I fucking love those things. So does my dog apparently, because when I read the breaking news about Patrick Mahomes’ extension, I literally spit out the one I was eating and he absolutely devoured it.

The sheer length of the contract first seized our attention. Ten years? Only baseball players and Jon Gruden sign contracts that long.

Before we could even grapple with its longevity, an even more tantalizing question quickly consumed our minds. Wait, then how much money is it? NFL insiders did not have that information right away, leaving us to wildly speculate on Twitter. And let’s be honest: sports Twitter is not a safe place for the imagination.

We knew it had to be worth over $400 million, which left Mike Trout’s recent $426.5 million extension as the next barrier to cross. Trout watched Mahomes leap past him like the Texans watched the Chiefs erase a 24-0 deficit in last year’s playoffs. With a single signature, Mahomes became the highest-paid athlete in the history of the world.

The final numbers of the extension appear to be 10 years for $450 million. Incentives could push the total value over $500 million. Half a billion dollars?!

Mahomes’ contract will likely be an outlier for quite a while. His extension will likely end the tradition of the highest paid quarterback simply being the last one to get paid. The next guys up for new deals, Dak Prescott and Deshaun Watson, are fantastic players and deserve elite-tier money, but they aren’t Patrick Mahomes. Nobody is approaching Mahomes’ contract until someone’s resume can match a league MVP and a Super Bowl ring before the age of 25 (cc: Jackson, Lamar).

The truth about NFL contracts is that the back years are essentially fake. Elite and/or aging players almost always have their contracts restructured before the end of the deal, and sometimes more than once. Drew Brees and Tom Brady seemingly rework their deals annually. Also, long-term contracts have typically only been four to five years in length, so speculating about Mahomes’ cap hit beyond 2025, let alone 2030, is rather trivial.

Mahomes’ deal ties him to the Chiefs through 2031, but let’s be honest: that isn’t breaking news. The Chiefs were never going to let Mahomes leave in free agency. He was never going to leave Kansas City. What this extension does is provide a sense of security and certainty. It’s a lot of money, yes, but now the Chiefs can build around an exact number, not an imaginary one. That’s an advantage for Kansas City. Hell, the Cowboys still don’t know what they will be paying Prescott this season and the Chiefs roughly know what Mahomes will cost in seven seasons.

Critics believe the contract will be too exorbitant for the Chiefs to be able to afford other talented players. No matter how awesome Mahomes is, they’ll argue, Kansas City won’t win anything with scrubs alongside him. There is some truth in that.

As Mahomes’ cap hit rises from just over $5 million this year, to about $25 million next year and then well into the forty-million range in the future, Kansas City will have less cap room to spend on other players. That’s undeniable.

A common fallacy is that paying a quarterback makes it impossible to build a championship team. That’s not true. Paying the wrong quarterback is the problem. The reason the Raiders haven’t been to the playoffs since 2016 isn’t because they gave Derek Carr a $125 million extension. It’s because they gave Derek Carr a $125 million extension. See the difference?

After consecutive Super Bowl appearances in the 2013 and 2014 seasons, the Seahawks have not returned to the NFC Championship. Russell Wilson’s miniscule rookie contract ballooned into one of the NFL’s highest salaries in 2015, but Wilson isn’t the one to blame for Seattle’s postseason shortcomings. He’s often been the only reason Seattle has made the playoffs at all.

The Seahawks stopped playing into late January because they inexplicably cannot stop drafting running backs and shitty pass rushers in the first round. Wilson’s large cap hit didn’t cause Seattle to run out of resources; they used the ones they had poorly.

The Chiefs emerge as huge winners for three reasons.

One: They have Patrick Mahomes on their team for the foreseeable (and unforeseeable, hello climate change) future.

Two: Mahomes agreed to tack the extension onto his current deal, rather than replacing it. That means Mahomes will carry the 30th-highest cap hit among quarterbacks this year at just over $5 million.

Third: This contract could actually be a discount for the Chiefs in the not too distant future. Honestly, as I dig into it, it’s hard to say this contract is anything other than a flat-out bargain.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m no saying Mahomes is getting screwed here by any means. He is going to have more money than he ever thought possible, but he also could’ve gotten significantly more money if he played his cards differently. That’s why the length of the deal was so surprising to many. It goes against the trend in all North American professional sports except baseball (and, frankly, I don’t understand what’s going on in that sport anymore).

LeBron started doing the one-plus-one deals during his second Cavaliers’ stint to maximize his earnings. Signing a new one-year deal each year is significantly more profitable than signing a five-year deal. That’s true in basketball because of the annual raise limitations of max contracts, but the NFL works a little differently, aside from the fact that contracts are not fully guaranteed.

The salary cap has been exploding in the NFL over the past decade. Since 2013, the cap has risen by over $10 million each season and settled in at about $200 million for the 2020 season. The NFL’s signed massive television rights contracts in 2013 with CBS ($1 billion annually), Fox ($1.1 billion annually) and NBC ($950 million annually) kick started the rapid growth.

Teams find themselves with more money to spend every single year. The highest paid players one year often find themselves getting paid below market value just a couple years later. That’s why players often opt for shorter deals over long-term security.

Those gigantic TV contracts are set to expire in 2022. Coincidentally, that’s exactly when Mahomes’ extension kicks in — actually, that might not be a coincidence. Chief’s GM Brett Veach has been planning the Chiefs’ future cap space around an inevitable Mahomes extension since 2017, when Mahomes was Alex Smith’s backup, so he may have been aiming for this all along.

Right as Mahomes’ extension begins, a bidding war between the goliaths of cable television and the behemoths of streaming services (Amazon, Apple, etc.) should accelerate the growth of the salary cap even further. It remains to be seen how COVID-19 will affect the salary cap, but the TV-rights bidding war in 2022 will almost certainly balance out any revenue losses in 2020-21.

That means the cap could reach $300 million by 2030, if not sooner. The average annual value of Mahomes’ extension ($45 million) would be worth about 15% of a $300 million cap, roughly how much Jared Goff earned in 2018. That’s why you can’t just look at the price tag and assume it’s too expensive. It’s also why I stated earlier that theorizing about Mahomes’ cap hit beyond about 2025 is foolish — because if Mahomes finds himself making Goff money, you can bet his agents are going to renegotiate (and the Chiefs will happily give him more money).

The cap doesn’t even need to reach $300 million for Mahomes to become a discount. I’d estimate that anything below 20% of the cap would be favorable for Kansas City. You could argue that could swing in either direction, but 20% is a round number so let’s just work with it. The cap only needs to reach $225 million for Mahomes’ $45 million to become a bargain by those standards. When you consider the extension doesn’t kick in until 2022 and the cap’s growth over the past seven years, it’s entirely possible that Mahomes’ cap hit could be less than 20% in year one of the extension.

There are several factors working against that possibility. Nobody knows how the pandemic will impact the league’s revenue. It could the salary cap to decline by 30-40% for all we know. The effect of no fans in attendance could be greater than we can imagine. We also can’t take for granted owners are greedy sons of bitches and will want to keep every penny they can. Additionally, the bidding war could prove to be less fruitful than people are projecting, potentially causing the cap to stagnate rather than continue its growth.

On the other hand, according to OverTheCap.com, the cap hits are much lower in the first five years of the extension. Mahomes’ cap hit will only be $31 million in the first year (2022) and have an AAV of $39.55 million over the first half of the deal. OTC estimates that $31 million will cover 13.8% of the cap, which again would put Mahomes in Goff territory (WTF were the Rams thinking again?).

I might have lost a few of you (okay, ALL of you) with all the intricacies there. The point is that with the dynamic nature of NFL contracts and the likely growth of the salary cap, it’s likely that Mahomes will actually be underpaid before the extension is even halfway over.

It cannot be understated that Mahomes is still only 24 years old. He’s only been playing quarterback for about six years. He didn’t know how to read a defense until over halfway through 2018. Mahomes is already the best player in the NFL and he’s going to improve as he matures and harnesses his understanding of the game.

There will be seasons in which the Chiefs don’t have as much talent as this past year. For example, we don’t even know if star defensive lineman Chris Jones will be on the team beyond next year. Mahomes is the Chiefs’ great equalizer. If the defense is bad one year, Mahomes can dial up the offense to make up for it. Kansas City won’t always have a receiving core so deep that Mecole Hardman is arguably the fifth option, but Mahomes will soon have to manipulate defenses before the snap.

The term “dynasty” is floated a bit recklessly these days, but there’s no reason to believe Kansas City won’t be contending for championships every year for the foreseeable future. It sounds premature, but with Mahomes and Andy Reid together, the NFL might already have the next Brady/Belichick. Six Super Bowls is an absurdly high bar, but I’m not going to be the one to doubt them.

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Kansas City, we’re just getting started. This is home. 📍⏰ pic.twitter.com/9a1WMO6ra2

— Patrick Mahomes II (@PatrickMahomes) July 8, 2020

LeBron has been the face of professional sports for the past decade or more. But he is about enter his late-30’s. His playing days are numbered. Mahomes is next in line for the throne.

He is a transcendent talent, who is capable of things on a football field that no other human can do. He is a born leader, who shows no fear in the face of adversity. He is a voice in the community, who “can’t wait” to use his newfound financial flexibility to help the Kansas City community and the world become “the best place that it could possibly be“.

In two seasons as a starter, he’s earned the first MVP award in Chiefs’ history and led them to a Super Bowl title. If not for a certain offsides penalty, he might have done it twice.

Patrick Mahomes wears a red and gold jersey with the number 15. And that’s not changing anytime soon. (You’re welcome, Kansas City.)