Quote (fuzzy159 @ Jan 24 2020 07:09pm)
I'm glad he won MVP. That overpay is going to be even better than Flacco's.
Flacco's contract was a perfect storm of bad timing.
The organization tried to extend him before the SB run at something like 16m/year, but Joe bet on himself and wound up with like 21m/yr. So we wound up paying top-dollar to an average QB when he was at his worst value. (I mean I don't think anyone would complain: we'll take the super bowl win).
This wouldn't have been so bad in and of itself, but we had absolutely no cap in 2013. So to accommodate for the cap crunch w/o losing our franchise QB, Flacco's initial cap hits had to be absurdly low. We're talking cap hits of 6/14/14m in the first three years. That really hurt the cap long-term, since that amount per year had to even out eventually... and it did, as he eventually started accounting for about 25m/year the final three years, and then 16m in dead money this year.
Now, in retrospect, if that amount was a smooth 20/year, I think the contract would have been just fine. But backloading too much of the contract really hurt long-term, and it was a result of poor planning.
At least with Lamar we know what we've got: an MVP-tier QB. Unlike Flacco, whom we didn't even know if he was going to be re-signed his contract year, we know well in advance that Lamar will have to be re-signed, and it's going to cost a lot of money. Seeing this coming ahead of time will allow the FO to plan ahead. And by all indications, they are planning ahead: they just extended Marcus Peters 3 years at a pretty even rate per year (no back-loading). This contract will, conveniently, end right about when Lamar needs to be extended. So odds are DeCosta will be more prepared to avoid the awful circumstances that led to the Flacco overpay.