Whereas if you have a second contract WB at market value, outside of Mahomes who there is only one of, history says you are 10-15 years from a SB aka however long it takes you move on from said QB plus 2 years of a rookie.
Right but with the way teams are manipulating the salary cap and innovating in that area, these little "historically" assessments will become less and less relevant and will be defeated anyway.
We're going to start seeing more and more franchise QBs signing lucrative extensions and still sitting in the 15-20% of the salary cap range (or less). And we know teams can win in that range, because they have and have recently.
For decades we've been told "you can't win with QBs taking up more than 15% of the salary cap" and "you can't win with large amounts of dead money on your salary cap".
Then, in 2021, the Rams shattered both. They spent $45.5M of salary cap space at the QB position (24.3% of their total cap space), including nearly $25M on a QB who didn't play a snap for them that year.
And 26.4% of their total cap space for the year was dead money. Almost $50M worth.
The Chiefs in 2022 spent 18.5% of their salary cap at the QB position, and 7.8% of their salary cap on dead money. That means that, for at least the last two season, you can unequivocally win a Lombardi with a roster that spends at least 25% of its total salary cap on QBs and dead money (i.e. players who don't contribute).
"Historically", that was deemed impossible. Now it seems more like the norm.
For reference, assuming the league average cap usage is $224.8M (the cap limit for the year), pretty much any time in the league could reasonably expect to be a Lombardi contender with a QB room that costs upwards of $45-50M this year. As long as the QB is producing (obviously everything depends on that, regardless of price), that's not a cost prohibitive number to success. And currently, no QB in the league has a cap hit > $40M. And that's unlikely to change.