Every year, there is talk across the major sports leagues about which players are due for contract extensions and huge paydays. The chatter is seemingly endless, and it often seems to cast a shadow over the sports themselves — talking heads arguing and debating, insisting that so-and-so is going to ‘reset the market’ or so-and-so is demanding the ‘market rate’ for his position. This is where the conversation goes awry, economically speaking.
The truth is that players are not commodities: they are neither fungible nor interchangeable. Each player brings a distinct skill set, and each team operates within a unique scheme, meaning that each player’s value is situational rather than universal. There is, thus, no ‘market rate’ for any player or position; contracts exist in relation to each team’s particular situation, and every dollar spent on one player (in a salary-cap league) directly reduces the resources available for others — where ‘overspending’ in any case necessarily means a loss of talent and depth at other positions.
Current and former players often pound the table for athletes to “get paid,” but in a hard salary-cap league, each payday carries a real cost: every high-priced contract limits how many other quality contributors a team can retain (and how much they can be compensated). It means that, where that ‘overpriced’ player underperforms or misses games, the team is without the necessary resources to compete against other teams that have been relatively smarter with their resources.
Owners, however, routinely authorize these large salaries for reasons unrelated to maximizing wins or optimizing postseason success — in most cases, it’s not about optimizing team performance, but about keeping a team competitive enough to maximize business outcomes. In this capacity, star players (and familiar names) provide a measure of consistency, help sell tickets and merchandise, and keep the fanbase hopeful. In practice, owners would rather field a .500 team with household names than a .500 team of equally capable but anonymous players, because the former is far more marketable. In a zero-sum league, where the average expectation is around .500, this tradeoff — sacrificing some roster efficiency to maintain continuity and sustain fan engagement — is predictable, systematic, and even rational from a business perspective; what is irrational is any fan who, while acknowledging these facts, remains a loyal fan nonetheless.
The optimal strategy for building a team under these constraints is, therefore, not simply to “pay the best player,” but to exploit timing and context: develop rookie or underrated players (and particularly players at high-priced positions) while they are ‘underpaid’ relative to their impact, then reassess once their contracts are due to expire, and once their accomplishments (or stats) call for a contract that could destabilize the rest of the roster. Note that where stats (as opposed to postseason success) form the primary basis for highly-priced contracts, especially for starting quarterbacks (who are the highest-paid players in the NFL), the tradeoffs are enormous, and the effects devastating.
Success at quarterback is highly contextual, and the true value of any contract is defined by scheme fit, roster composition, organizational goals, and the player’s ability to singlehandedly lead the team to victory, particularly when it counts — and to do so without the complement of talented players that the team will naturally have to sacrifice in order to make cap space for any player’s big contract. Simply put, the true value of any quarterback, and any player, is determined not by mere stats nor by any arbitrary league-wide benchmark (much less the poor spending decisions of any other team), but by the actual demands of each team’s scheme and the supply of available players who can fill the given role.
Consider this: in the 2025 season, there were fifteen NFL quarterbacks who each carried salary cap hits exceeding the combined 2025 salaries of the starting quarterbacks in Super Bowl LX — a disparity that also holds when comparing average annual contract values. Of those fifteen quarterbacks, only three even managed to qualify for the playoffs this year.
Then consider the big contract extension signed by running back Todd Gurley in 2018. In July 2018, the Los Angeles Rams signed Todd Gurley to a four-year contract extension worth up to $60 million. With an average annual value of roughly $15 million, the deal made Gurley the highest-paid running back in NFL history at the time. It also included $45 million in guaranteed money, another league record for the position. Adam Schefter and ESPN described the extension as one that “reset the running back market,” as players and agents could now point to Gurley’s contract as leverage in future negotiations. That is precisely what followed. Subsequent deals for players such as Le’Veon Bell, Ezekiel Elliott, and David Johnson reflected the influence of Gurley’s record-setting extension.
However, the optimism surrounding each of these contracts proved short-lived. None of these players ultimately lived up to the expectations that had justified their deals at the time they were signed. Most running backs who received top-of-the-market contracts in the wake of Gurley’s extension significantly underperformed, suffered from chronic injuries, were relegated to backup or committee roles, or changed teams before the conclusion of their new contracts. These high-profile failures demonstrated to NFL owners the risks of over-investing in a single player at the running back position. As a result, with only a few exceptions, the league has largely abandoned the traditional “bell-cow” running back model in favor of a running-back-by-committee approach. Correspondingly, contracts for running backs have shrunk across the league. A similar correction may eventually occur among quarterback contracts as well — assuming owners are willing to apply the same lessons.
In short, in the modern NFL, individual paydays, star power, and marquee contracts exist less to optimize winning than to manage perception, revenue, and leverage within a capped system, and teams that fail to account for the interplay between these factors often pay the price on the field — where fans are continually disappointed in the face of false hope and unending hype, and while team management does just enough to maintain faith in the organization and to keep fans supporting their teams with their wallets. After all, the latter represents the only language that most in the NFL respect when it comes to their fans, considering the fact that, so far as ‘values’ are concerned, the league is essentially two things: a money maker and a political tool. As it turns out, those are the only ‘values’ left in the NFL as a whole. Everything else serves merely to dress it up and keep it viable as a business and political enterprise.
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