All things I agree however to play devils advocate
1. It might not get more expensive. Lamar may never develop in the quality passer we need or worse get injured.
2. It will be difficult to keep the cost cheap up front as any signing bonus will count against our limited cap in 2021. I’m sure DeCosta and the cap gurus can figure out a solution though.
3. 23 million over the next two years is no chump change. If that doesn’t keep Lamar happy we got big issues. I totally agree on 6th franchise tag .... just a last resort if need be. If we don’t know by year six if he’s the guy we maybe in trouble.
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1. The "developing into a better passer" argument is fine, but realistically, if he just maintains his current level as a passer for the next year or two, he's, at least, a $35M a year QB. He would have to get significantly worse as a passer for that number to come down. Injury would be a concern obviously, but that's also true of every QB quite frankly, and it would depend on the injury itself.
2. Only a portion of the signing bonus counts towards 2021. Signing bonuses, and really any bonuses, are usually prorated over the life of the deal. They're appealing to players because the players gets all the cash up front, while the team gets to spread out that impact for the salary cap.
Any possible deal we give him this offseason is going to be largely year 1 bonus money and littered with back-end escalations. Pretty much team in the league can afford to front-load contracts when the salary cap is likely to decline at least $10-15M.
Any deal he signs is technically an extension, since he's already under contract for 2021 at a $1.7M base salary. Most likely, they won't touch his salary... they'll just give him a very large signing bonus and prorate it. So if we were to do, say, a 4 year, $150M extension, they may give him like $40-50M in bonuses for this year, which they'll prorate over 5 years, so his cap hit will go up like $10M this year, but not destroy the team.
With Mahomes, they wont low on the signing bonus, but also did some pretty gigantic annual roster bonuses.
More cap savvy teams are trending towards less in bonuses, more in base salaries, so that the cap impact is more "flat" over the life of a deal, but when you don't have the cap space to do it and the cap is declining, that may not be an option.
The obvious problem with backloading is, well, you'll have gigantic increases year-over-year. Its the problem teams like the Eagles and Rams have with their QBs. Even the Chiefs. Mahomes costs $19.5M more next year than he did in 2020. Is he worth it? Of course. But the point is you have the same player costing like 5x what he costs the prior year. Is he going to perform 5x better because he costs 5x more? Of course not.
3. $23M over the next two years would, in QB terms, be a slap in the face. High-end backups make that kind of money. For context, $21M over two years is what Taysom Hill will make in New Orleans for 2020-2021. Lamar Jackson is a LOT more valuable than $1M more a year than Taysom Hill.
I don't know what the right answer is for how many years I'd extend Lamar. I probably wouldn't give him more than 4 years, which means keeping him here for the next 5. I'm definitely not doing some Mahomes-level like 10 year contract. But even if you somehow manage to get him on a "hometown discount" of sort (which isn't a real thing usually in these discussions), any discussion starts with $30M in average annual value, and likely goes much higher. After that's, its just how you manipulate the cap to make it work.
They're a couple to three years ahead of us on that. Plus, the FA signings they've made have been pretty high impact too. We do a good job of those things, but the Chiefs have done it a little better. I think that counts for a lot. Plus, who do you trust on developing a cohesive OFF? Andy Reid or JH? JH is a good personnel manager, not so sure - - - still, after all these years, his impact on X's and O's. It's pretty clear Andy Reid is one of the best X and O guys.