What Does Jared Goff’s New Deal Mean for the Offseason Quarterback Market?

Football isn’t played on a spreadsheet, and football rosters can’t solely be built on one, either. The merits of the Detroit Lions giving Jared Goff a four-year, $212 million extension can and will be debated. His new average annual salary ($53 million per year) puts him ahead of quarterbacks like Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, and Josh Allen. Giving a second-tier quarterback—if we’re being generous—the same slice of the pie that truly elite players get is not a winning business model. But letting the guy who inspired this walk out of the building also isn’t a great business model:

And that matters. As does this:

And this:

It’s not surprising that the Lions committed to Goff. Head coach Dan Campbell and general manager Brad Holmes have made it clear that Goff is a significant part of their future plans. But even so, the deal’s value caused more than a few double takes, especially the average annual value and the $170 million in guarantees. Yes, the league’s salary cap did jump by 13.6 percent this offseason, going from roughly $225 million last year to $255 million in 2024. But even when accounting for salary cap inflation, Goff did get a big bump in pay compared to other sub-elite quarterbacks. Here are all the major quarterback contracts given out since Mahomes reset the market in 2020 by signing a 10-year, $450 million deal:

Goff is the first sub-elite quarterback to earn at least 20 percent of the salary cap (based on the year the contract was signed), which is significant. Since the groundbreaking Mahomes deal, franchise quarterbacks have essentially fallen into one of two pay tiers: The Tier 1 franchise guys like Josh Allen, Joe Burrow, Lamar Jackson, Justin Herbert, and Jalen Hurts, whose deals accounted for an average of 23 to 24 percent of the cap when signed; and the Tier 2 guys, like Kirk Cousins and Derek Carr. Before Goff put pen to paper this week, those guys pulled in about 17 to 19 percent of the cap when signed. That’s where Goff fell when he inked an extension with the Rams in 2019. Now, though, Goff’s new deal will account for 21 percent of Detroit’s salary cap. So he got a significant raise—but not one that puts him in the top pay grade, suggesting that yesterday’s price for a second-tier quarterback is not today’s price.

That’s good and bad news for Jaguars, Packers, and Cowboys fans, who may have been worried that Goff’s monster extension would impact contract negotiations for Trevor Lawrence, Jordan Love, and Dak Prescott, respectively, this spring. The good news is that Goff’s deal shouldn’t have an effect on those deals. The bad news is that the contract floor for those negotiations was set in September, when the Bengals gave Joe Burrow a five-year deal with a $55 million AAV, or about 24 percent of the 2023 salary cap. With the cap swelling to $255.4 million this offseason, a deal in that ballpark now would fetch at least $60 million per season. If Lawrence’s, Love’s, and Prescott’s agents are doing their jobs, that will be the starting point for contract talks. Goff’s contract isn’t the floor for their negotiations. It’s the damn basement.

You can debate whether Prescott deserves to be in the Tier 1 group all you want, but he’s coming off an MVP-caliber season and has kept Dallas around the top of the statistical charts even as offensive talent has left the building in droves. Lawrence’s spot is not debatable, which says more about the state of the Jaguars than his own individual accomplishments. The fourth-year quarterback is off to an inconsistent start to his career, but he’s the only thing keeping his franchise from collapsing. His agents should be asking for an ownership stake at this point. One of these two will likely be the first to break the $60 million-a-year mark this year, and the other could follow suit.

In theory, Love’s tier should be harder to work out. He’s played just one full NFL season, and he didn’t look like a franchise quarterback over the first half of it. But Green Bay has a different and clearer point of view on the progress he’s made. The Packers have seen him every day in practice for the past four years. They’re not doing nearly as much guesswork when projecting his future value as the public will have to do. And the small sample size of top-level quarterback play we got from Love late in the season and into the playoffs should be enough to earn him a top-of-the-market deal. Not only did he lead Green Bay to a surprising postseason berth (and a big win over Dallas in the wild-card round), but he did it in style. It remains to be seen whether Love will develop into an elite quarterback, but so far, he looks like one who could earn $60 million a year.

Where Goff’s deal will have ramifications, though, is in Miami, where Tua Tagovailoa and the Dolphins are in the early stages of contract talks. If Tagovailoa’s team had been eyeing the four-year, $180 million deal Kirk Cousins signed with Atlanta this year as a contract model, that is no longer the case. Tagovailoa hasn’t brought Miami to a conference title game, but he’s outproduced Goff over the past three seasons, and he’s three years younger.

Goff and Tagovailoa play two different styles, but they have the same weakness: dealing with pressure.

The numbers give Tagovailoa a clear edge in that department, and a convincing argument can be made that his quick trigger is more integral to Miami’s offense than what Goff does for the Lions. Tagovailoa’s 2.07-second average time to throw on unpressured dropbacks was the most significant factor in Miami’s low pressure rate last season. And while Goff’s largely been able to avoid pressure during his Lions tenure, that’s because of the team’s dominant offensive line and run-first scheme, which doesn’t allow opposing defenses to go into pure pass-rush mode too often. If the Lions offensive line falls off, or coordinator Ben Johnson departs for a head-coaching job—which surprisingly didn’t happen this offseason—we may see the worst of Goff’s game more often. Tagovailoa isn’t so reliant on a good O-line, and he won’t be losing scheme-lord Mike McDaniel anytime soon.

Tagovailoa also has a similar football backstory to Goff. Both were cast aside by coaches who benched them in pivotal late-season games. But instead of being traded to a team with a coach who did believe in him, as happened for Goff when he was sent to Detroit, Tagovailoa had a coach brought to him when the Dolphins hired McDaniel. The belief McDaniel has shown in Tua has carried over to the fan base, which may not be chanting his name at Heat games but will passionately defend him. The same goes for the locker room. Tyreek Hill was favorably comparing Tua to Mahomes before he even caught a pass from the guy. People like me may question Tagovailoa’s value, but those who influence the decision—whether it’s the coaches, the fans, or other players—do not.

Of course, Tagovailoa’s troubling history of head injuries—not to mention a significant hip injury he suffered in college—will be another key factor here. Goff has been durable throughout his career and hasn’t missed a start since 2021. That’s a point in his favor. But we’ve also seen a number of quarterbacks with legitimate injury concerns—like Jackson, Burrow, and Cousins—sign for big numbers. Tagovailoa got through the 2023 season healthy, and he’s put in a lot of offseason work to ensure that continues, which should make it easier for his agents to skirt the injury questions in negotiations.

As ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler recently pointed out, Miami’s offseason moves, which included several cost-cutting measures, suggest the team will come to an agreement with Tagovailoa before the regular season kicks off in September. The only question is, “How much?” Now that the floor for second-tier contracts has been reset, we have a better idea of the answer: at least $55 million a year. It’s not a surprise that the price for a Tier-2 quarterback is going up. We saw this play out in the draft, with six quarterbacks taken in the top 12, including a few who would have been viewed as day-two prospects in past drafts. Even with all those quarterbacks congested at the top of the board, there was still a clear dividing line between the tiers, with Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels, and Drake Maye going 1-2-3 to start the draft, and Michael Penix Jr., J.J. McCarthy, and Bo Nix falling between picks 8 and 12. It’s the same line that’s been drawn at the top of the NFL’s quarterback pay scale.

A few years ago, it seemed like the league’s thirst for quarterbacks had been quenched. Teams were just giving away legitimate franchise guys, with New England letting Tom Brady walk, Seattle trading Russell Wilson in what should have been his prime, the Packers telling Aaron Rodgers to kick rocks, and the Lions shipping off Matthew Stafford. But it now appears the league has never been more desperate for quarterbacks—and the price will only go up from here.