The Matriculation of Tagovailoa and Love

Paying a young quarterback is like paying for college: write the check, hope for the best, and get ready for four years of boiling ramen.

Paying for a quarterback these days is like paying for college.

Anyone with a college age/eligible/interested child or two understands the dilemma that the Packers and Dolphins front offices faced over the last few months. An American four-year university with all the trimmings costs [opens Rutgers parent portal] [opens Rowan parent portal] [stares into the middle distance for 30 minutes] tens of thousands of dollars per year per student. The cost-benefit/return-on-investment calculus is completely out of whack. A year or two of community college (the educational equivalent of drafting a rookie) as a prelude to higher education is far cheaper, and it comes with other perks: that tuition money could be spent on a reliable car (or Stefon Diggs), for example. A trade school (rolling with Baker Mayfield or Geno Smith for a while) also has multiple advantages for those who can get past some outmoded perceptions of upward mobility.

Sure, if your child is the academic equivalent of Josh Allen or Lamar Jackson – a 1450 SAT score, president of the student council – the four-year university makes the most sense. But what if your child is Tua Tagovailoa: bright, industrious, a little dependent on their support network, a solid B student in honors (not Advanced Placement) calculus? What if your child is Jordan Love, who only switched on the intellectual turbo-chargers last November? Remember: you will be eating ramen noodles for dinner, paying a mortgage into your 60s and/or saddling your child with future debt based on your answer to those questions.

That settles it, you decide after a sober look at all the variables, Junior is going to county college to get science-requirement Geology 101 credits on the cheap while picking a major or career. Wise choice. Now sell that decision to Junior, who just bought a lava lamp and can’t wait to join the intramural Pokemon Go team. Sell it to your spouse, who just picked out twin sheets for the dorm room and has already measured the soon-to-be-empty bedroom to figure out where the sewing table will go. All junior’s pals are going away to college. All your pals’ kids are going, too. Just how convinced are you, really, about the advantages of the accelerated program at the HVAC Institute?

Sure, sometimes the whole family sees the wisdom of the community college/trade school/gap year route. But if your children seek the classic college experience, chances are that you want so badly to grant it to them that the alternatives would feel like a failure. Furthermore, if you are fortunate, frugal and farsighted, at least some of the money has already been budgeted. The risks associated with the four-year college become the risks you would rather take, cost-benefit analysis be damned.

Now replace the four-year college experience with the franchise quarterback experience. The Dolphins and Packers want to live in a world where they are “set” at quarterback. They’d rather pay to live in that world than explore the alternatives, even if they are splurging on the quarterback equivalents of undeclared majors with 3.1 GPAs. The money is already more-or-less budgeted. All the other parents on the block did the same thing. Breaking the bank for Tagovailoa or Love may not be the best choice, but it’s the least pessimistic, most hopeful choice, the one that expresses faith in all parties.

The Tagovailoa and Love extensions represent a drift in spending philosophy that has been so subtle that the spenders themselves might not have noticed. Teams used to approach mammoth contracts for young veterans by thinking, “Well, this is what premium quarterback play costs.” For Tua and Love, that mentality drifted closer to, “Well, this is what quarterback play costs.” Parents started doing the same thing right around the time when I entered college. A four-year college became the default suburban-kid option, which resulted in not just myriad stomach-pumpings and mild-to-moderate addictions but lots of 20-somethings with business degrees working retail. It’s part of the defining Gen X experience, and therefore not a very good model for successful football operations.

The Dolphins signaled their diffidence toward Tua for well over a year, which is why he didn’t receive an extension when peers Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert and Jalen Hurts all got theirs in 2023. The Packers were unsure of Love when they signed him to a short bridge contract last year; it's unclear how sure they can really be right now based on a hot streak which began last November. The Dolphins and Packers are like parents who were still hounding their kids to finish their homework and wondering if Tyreek the Tutor helped write that term paper last autumn. They still chose to twist their future budgets in knots and write the big checks. The right choice? Maybe. The most palatable, least cynical choice? Absolutely.

Both the Dolphins and Packers hedged their investments a bit. Love’s reported $220-million contract only contains $100.8 million in full guarantees: dad isn’t springing for room and board beyond freshman year just yet. Tagovailoa’s full (non-injury) guarantees stand at just $93 million; the Dolphins could conceivably pull the ripcord after the 2025 season if he switches majors from chemical engineering to medieval studies. For NFL teams, the question is no longer whether to pay the young veteran quarterback but how to pay him just enough to keep him happy without potentially crippling the franchise for half a decade. The tuition analogy here is too obvious to belabor.

If you think the Packers and Dolphins have overpaid for Love and Tagovailoa, you need to at least reevaluate Jerry Jones’ “strategy” (let’s be kind) surrounding Dak Prescott. Jerrah is a bloviating doofus, and Prescott is a significantly better quarterback than Tua, with a much lower misevaluation risk than Love. But Prescott is also a little like the young adult with a Master’s degree in music theory noodling on a synthesizer in dad’s basement. Jerrah’s unhappy with the return on his Prescott investment. The empty-nester experience is starting to look really good to him.

The Cowboys may look very foolish if they let Prescott walk, but Jerrah can be forgiven for not wanting to pay $60 million per year for a quarterback he’s clearly somewhat disappointed in after nine years of failure to fully launch. It’s hard to criticize some teams for overspending while simultaneously roasting the one person who appears unafraid to take a less-popular, more-treacherous approach.

(Jerrah made an offer to Prescott after the Tagovailoa/Love deals, so maybe he’s dragging his feet instead of digging them in. It’s likely that he’s not sure himself.)

Love and Tagovailoa should represent the absolute “floor” for quarterbacks considered worthy of top-tier contracts. Below them are the C-plus students with what-EVER attitudes toward academics. Mitch Trubisky wasn’t that much less accomplished than Love and Tua during his Bears tenure: remember that there was a playoff season, a Pro Bowl berth, a Love-like “he’s ARRIVED” hot streak in 2018 and some Tua-like conversations about his dependence on his scheme and supporting cast. Teams have grown so generous and worried about what’s behind Door Number Two that they’re one step away from over-committing to someone like Trubisky. The Giants did so with Daniel Jones last year, and it illustrates the risks of even a hedged, “affordable” contract: a three-year investment in the wrong person can look like a sunk cost after just a few months. The Bears, meanwhile, haven’t exactly thrived since punting on Trubisky, though they have at least enjoyed the flexibility to explore lots of alternatives.

In a league where Patrick Mahomes is the only truly “successful” young quarterback in the most superficial sense, no team can afford to scream Why can’t you be more like Patrick? at their youngsters for three years, then buy them lawnmowers for graduation. The 49ers are also illustrating that the grass isn’t always greener in the cheap quarterback/expensive roster neighborhood. Every team in the NFL is either overpaying a quality quarterback, saving up to pay one in a year or two or praying for the chance to do so in the future. Figuring out how to pay a promising, healthy quarterback — or educate a promising, healthy young adult — is a blessing of a problem.

A parent can’t ignore the risks when writing a college tuition check: drunken debauchery, edibles and Elden Ring, a journalism degree with a six-figure price tag that might as well be printed on Charmin. As parents, we can’t dwell on such risks, either. We trust ourselves and our kids to tackle challenges head-on as we focus on our mutual dreams and goals. Everything will work out for the best. And if it doesn’t, we’ll still have each other.

NFL teams take the same approach with their quarterbacks. Slumps will happen. Receivers will grumble for money. Flaws will be exposed and attacked. And any big contract is one major injury away from becoming a burden, no matter how outstanding the quarterback. The Dolphins and Packers have made a commitment to support Love and Tagovailoa. Hopefully, eventually, they will share their successes.

In many ways, the whopping Love/Tua contracts are more like extravagant modern weddings than college tuition. The upfront money is foolish and could lead to debts that the happy couple (and their parents) will still be paying until everyone is not quite so happy. Still, it’s an important symbolic gesture to the world. We’ve cast our doubts aside and gone all-in. For better or for worse. For three years, anyway.

Though really, wouldn’t a justice of the peace and a backyard barbecue make just as much sense as a cathedral and a Cape May hotel? You could spend the savings to pay down your student loans, and …

Ugh, now there’s a set of expenses I’m not ready to worry about just yet.

(Note: This column is not meant to be a reflection of my opinions of my own children, who are better students than Tagovailoa and Love are quarterbacks.)