Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes is the most valuable player in the NFL, as it relates to value he brings to his team and to the league. He generates massive interest. He makes football games more exciting than they otherwise would be. The fact that he’s too humble to let those realities change him only adds his appeal.
He’s worth at least $100 million per year to the NFL, without question.
True to character, as his new-money APY of $45 million per year slips farther down the stack of highest-paid players, Mahomes isn’t complaining. He’s happy that others are getting more.
“It’s awesome for the game of football,” Mahomes told Jarrett Bell of USA Today in the wake of Packers quarterback Jordan Love getting to $55 million per year and Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa getting to $53.1 million per year.
“It’s awesome for the quarterback position, but I think all positions,” Mahomes told Bell. “I know every time a contract comes up, everybody looks at my APY . . . and everything like that. I’m doing pretty well myself. For me, it’s just about going out there trying to win football games, trying to make money for my family at the end of the day. I feel like I’m doing a great job of that.”
So does he feel underpaid?
“Not necessarily,” Mahomes said.
And there’s a reason for that. As Bell notes, we showed that, even as others have gotten higher and higher APYs, Mahomes has the highest four-year cash flow from 2023-26 and 2024-27.
“I think we do a great job of managing my money, to be able to pay me a lot of money and keep a good team around me,” Mahomes said of the Chiefs. “I know we’ve kind of restructured it a couple of times and got the cash flow up in certain spots and certain years. It’s about having a good dialogue, good communication with the front office, with ownership. We’ve done that here. And as we’ve been able to allow me to be a highly-paid guy while at the same time build a great team around me.”
That’s where the salary cap helps owners in their quest to hold individual salaries down. They enlist media and fans to shame players into taking less by harping on the notion that it keeps the team from having enough great players.
This overlooks two key factors. One, the cap keeps going up and up and up. So there’s always more money, for everyone. (The looming disappearance of $14.1 billion could change that, of course.) Two, every team can replenish more than 10 percent of the roster every year with draft picks who operate under drastically restricted deals.
Over any four-year cycle, every team can pick at least 28 players (more if they don’t re-sign free agents) who can keep the machine humming without costing much money, relative to the best players on the team. That’s what the Bengals apparently would like to do around Joe Burrow. And it just might work.
Getting a great player to take less is the ultimate hack of the salary-cap system. Still, if/when a team has a great player who does indeed take less, it’s important to watch whether the team spends to the cap, every year. Whether it does all it can to augment the roster by keeping its own impact players and rounding out the roster by luring free agents to town merits careful consideration. Otherwise, the best player(s) on the team should be getting more.
It’s also why tying the pay of quarterbacks to a percentage of the salary cap continues to be the perfect approach to ensuring that the quarterback is fairly compensated, and that there’s enough money for everyone else. But the teams continue to resist, because the league tells them to. (Collusion, anyone?)
Why refuse to do it? Maybe all that noise about having more money for other players is just a load of crap. Maybe tying franchise quarterback pay to cap percentage would expose that. Maybe the truth is that the owners would love to find a way to have competitive teams while still spending closer to the minimum than the maximum, because every dollar saved on players is literally a dollar earned.