Why the Brock Purdy Contract Stinks

We've reached the the era of rational NFL spending, and it sucks.

Quarterback contracts used to be gross, gnarly and cool.

Quarterback contracts used to be excessive and overindulgent, like those five-pound bacon donut burgers that are free if you are willing to cut a decade off your life by eating one in under 30 minutes. Negotiations were often as protracted and contentious as peace treaties; either that, or as rushed and ill-conceived as a drug deal behind the liquor store. The fine print was sometimes as nefarious as a terms-of-service agreement. Did you know that Apple owns one of your kidneys? You should not have downloaded “(Keep Feeling) Fascination” by the Human League for 99 cents back in 2006. Caveat emptor.

Learning the details of those old contracts was like cackling from the distant-relations table at a wedding reception while the groom leered at the bridesmaids and the bride screamed at the caterer. Hoo-boy, these kids are gonna REGRET this. Sooner than later.

Old-fashioned, obscenely-bloated, downright-Faustian everlasting-gobstopper quarterback contracts were also veritable sports-media content farms. An enterprising writer could milk “What’s going on with the Dak Prescott extension?” or “Why franchise-tagging Kirk Cousins a sixth-straight time is bad” for months or years. We could shout PAY THE MAN on podcasts or talkshows for weeks, then theatrically wag our fingers and shake our heads once the man was actually paid a little (a lot, really) more than was advisable. Years later, when the general manager was tearing the fabric of the space-time continuum just to achieve cap compliance, we could write in stentorian, authoritative prose: You see, with 18% of their cap space eaten up by a 37-year old coming off his seventh-straight rotator cuff surgery, this foolish team simply cannot build a playoff-caliber roster.

You know: the stuff we only get to say about the Browns and Saints these days.

Nowadays, we get Brock Purdy and the 49ers amicably agreeing to a $265-million contract in May. May???? We didn’t even get a minicamp holdout to overdramatize! And these are the 49ers, for heaven’s sake: the franchise that never met a big-name veteran that it couldn’t alienate with its intermittent-fasting approach to contract negotiations. Furthermore, this is Purdy, perhaps the primest candidate for WE MADE U AND WE CAN BREAK U system-quarterback lowballing in NFL history! Why, I had a “Five Potential Trade Partners for Purdy” (1. Steelers. 2. Steelers …) column scheduled for Fourth of July Weekend! It was going to be quick and easy to belch onto the Internet before watching fireworks informative journalism!

The Purdy deal, per the details that have drizzled out, includes the standard amount of phony-baloney money: no more, no less. Complaining about the fake money in a reported quarterback contract is like complaining about airline food: 1980s stand-up comics would like their material back, please and thank you.

The Purdy deal is big but far from the biggest. Albert Breer, who got the early scoop on the details, reported that Purdy’s de-facto guarantees clock in at $176 million, less than the current Josh Allen, Dak Prescott, Deshaun Watson, Joe Burrow, Trevor Lawrence, Justin Herbert, Jared Goff and Jalen Hurts contracts. (Patrick Mahomes’ deal is carved in runes onto a glowing obelisk and therefore cannot be compared with mortal covenants.) Purdy is getting 10th-best quarterback money, which is more-or-less in line with the best approximations of his actual value.

Purdy squeezed a no-trade clause from the 49ers. Those of us hardwired to comb contracts for hot takes ended up clinging to that clause like Rose to that big-enough-to-also-accommodate-Jack plank floating in the North Atlantic. Look for no-trade clauses to become standard in rich-and-famous quarterback contracts moving forward. If the player isn’t seeking to break compensation records and the team constructs the contract carefully, a “mutual parting of ways” will make more sense for both sides than a trade if things don’t work out.

There may be some hidden surprises in the Purdy contract, but the shape of the deal suggests that is unlikely, and the 49ers wouldn’t sneak some No Call of Duty clause into the fine print. The 49ers will never be financially “crippled” by Purdy’s contract, even if he remains more dependent on teammates and scheme than an Allen or Jackson. In fact, the 49ers celebrated the Purdy deal by extending Fred Warner. That’s like passing up the Colonoscopy Burger for the Normal Person Burger, and thereby saving room for ice cream.

Purdy’s contract resembles Jared Goff’s contract in size and shape. Breer writes that “Goff’s deal was an important comparison because both sides saw it as one that didn’t break records, but did well by the player in many different ways.”

In other words, the player’s side of the negotiations came to the table with, Look, we know our guy ain’t Josh Allen, but he’s totally in the same ballpark as Jared Goff. That’s an evolved negotiation tactic when compared to the stance taken by quarterback agents of the 2010s and early 2020s: Carson had a wedding in Paris, so Trevor demands to have his on the moon. If NFL fiscal sanity was going to come from anywhere, it wasn’t going to come from the teams themselves, not those wacky owners.

Granted, owners and teams evolved a little, too. They had no choice. Deshaun Watson’s contract was the meteor. Watson’s quarter-billion guarantee has become an event horizon which, four offseasons later, only Allen and Prescott have crossed, both of them on their second major extensions. Any agent seeking a Deshaun-sized contract for your typical up-and-coming quarterback received an emphatic NO. Call it collusion if you like, but none of us need collusion to agree never to drink bleach.

Just as the Browns and Descuzzball provided the NFL with a moment of quarterback-compensation clarity, Howie Roseman came up with a contract structure that was closer to chaotic neutral than than the neutral evil status quo. The Jalen Hurts contract, which can cause seizures if you stare at it too long, was translated into a language humans can comprehend and turned into the Lamar Jackson contract. Teams suddenly had new methods for smearing bananapants bonuses across multiple years without resorting to the Stupid Saints Trick of just turning everything into a bonus and stuffing the cap penalties into a closet.

All of this happened just as Jordan Love and Tua Tagovailoa came to market with their spotty franchise-quarterback bona-fides. Love and Tua, like Purdy, earned guarantees in the $160-million range. The NFL has therefore officially established a second tier of quarterback compensation! That means that a team like the Texans now has a third choice for C.J. Stroud besides “pay him like Joe Burrow,” or “treat him like something moldy found in the bottom of the pantry.” If Stroud remains in the honorable-mention category among franchise quarterbacks, the Texans could sign him for Purdy money next year. It’s a win-win-win for franchise, player and fans who don’t want their team forced to either start over or pay a non-Mahomes so much that they cannot afford to maintain his offensive line.

Ah, but the emergence of a new quarterback upper-middle class is a loss for jerkwads like me who point and laugh at bad contracts for fun and profit. Especially at bad 49ers contracts! C’mon, these hosers were one step from nuking the roster when they traded Deebo Samuel in February. Now they’ve placated their remaining veterans, rebuilt their defense through the draft AND secured Purdy without being forced to sell George Kittle and Kyle Juszczyk for scientific experiments? I took a peek at the DVOA projections, and damnit, the analytics think the 2025 49ers are a mid-2010s Patriots team or something. Not cool. No fun.

Oh well. Here’s hoping Jerrah really f**ks up the Micah Parsons deal.

If quarterback contracts used to be like regrettable budget-obliterating destination weddings, running back contracts used to be more like a sweaty divorcee tossing his car keys to a pole dancer. Teams just couldn’t wait to tie up ten figures of cap space for a worn-down running back’s lingering-hamstring-issue, 3.7-yards-per-carry end-of-career seasons.

In that respect, Derrick Henry’s new extension is almost as disappointing as Brock Purdy’s contract.

Henry rushed for 1,921 yards and 16 touchdowns last year. The Ravens rewarded him with what amounts to a two-year $27-million guaranteed extension. Henry is a future Hall of Famer coming off a signature season, but his extension could fit within the rounding errors of the Purdy deal.

Yes, there’s a chance that Henry’s timing belt snaps in September, leaving the Ravens on the hook for two expensive years. But that’s a rather short period of time to be stuck on a manageable hook for a guy who sells a bazillion jerseys. Every guarantee comes with a risk, after all. And the Ravens are Super Bowl contenders looking to leverage every advantage, not some rebuilding team playing a resource-management sim.

Saquon Barkley’s $36-million guaranteed extension, another deal scrawled in pentagrams by Aleister Howie, is richer than Henry’s, but Saquon is younger and has lower mileage. And Saquon’s deal can vanish in a poof of brimstone after the 2026 offseason. I could push my reading glasses up my nose and sniffle about the likelihood that the Eagles will be overpaying Saquon in two years for his 2024 accomplishments, but those accomplishments are still fresh in my mind, and any fans who would rather watch the Eagles play fundamentalist Moneyball than line up for the Saquon sequels need to give themselves a bifurcating, worldview-resetting wedgie.

The Todd Gurley, Ezekiel Elliott and Le’Veon Bell contracts feel like relics from another era in a different universe. Running back salaries, like quarterback contracts, are achieving a semi-rational equilibrium.

The same thing appears to be happening at other positions. That makes sense. It has been 15 years since the rookie wage scale brought the last significant changes to NFL salary structures. We’re five years into the current collective bargaining agreement and (depending on how you count) several years removed from the time when the pandemic impacted NFL revenues, briefly nerfing the cap. After 15 years of trial-and-error, teams have figured out what works. Not every tactic has been fully optimized, and not every stakeholder will behave rationally all the time, but we’ve landed at the point where there is both a quarterback middle class AND a running back ruling class.

Again: it’s bad news for those of us who try to gin up drama from the hot stove league. But we will always have fun historical content like the All-Time Top 5 QB series to look forward to.

COMING UP AT THE TOO DEEP ZONE: We no longer have the All-Time Top 5 QB series to look forward to; the final installment was published on Monday. But readers still have questions about where Jalen Hurts, Jared Goff and others rank after their excellent 2024 seasons. Those questions and others will be answered in next week’s All-Time Top 5 QB Wrap-up Show!

Did you come seeking Tush Push thoughts? Matt Lombardo and I covered the league’s effort to project its insecurities onto the Eagles on the Between the Hashmarks podcast. You can check it out here or here:

Ding, Dong, The Tush Push Ban is Dead [PODCAST]

I am hard at work on chapters for Aaron Schatz’s FTN Almanac 2025, which you can pre-order now. I’ll be reviewing news and notes from minicamps over the next few weeks here at the Too Deep Zone, with one eye on the NFC North (Woo-hoo!) and the other on the NFC South (D’oh!), because those are the teams I am writing about in the Almanac. There may be an off-NFL-topic essay or two, as well as shorter columns like this one, in the mix as I battle the book deadlines.

As for historical content … I am taking a deep breath before planning my next move. I will be writing about something old-timey as spring turns to summer. Stay tuned.

Photo from Creative Commons Zero