Patrick Mahomes New Contract Should Spur NFL Rule Change

BY ADAM GREENE

First off, let’s just get this out of the way right now. Patrick Mahomes is worth every penny the Kansas City Chiefs will pay him over the next decade-plus. In fact, in spite of the fact that the contract is valued at up to $503 million over 10 years, make no mistake, he’ll end up making more than that.

Five or six years from now, this contract will probably be torn up and he’ll sign an even bigger one for another 10 years. Why? Because he’s Patrick Mahomes, that’s why.

As of this writing, because of Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs are the prohibitive favorites to win Super Bowl LV at +650. They are favored to win the AFC at +325 and Mahomes is a significant favorite to win the 2020-21 NFL MVP at +450. He is the face of the modern NFL and the league is absolutely, 100 percent OK with that.

There are few players alive right now more fun to watch than Mahomes, but you know what will be less fun? When you have to watch him toss passes to a bunch of undrafted free agents and NFL cast-offs because Kansas City can’t afford to keep an offense around him. It’s going to be even less fun to see Mahomes go down with an injury behind a make shift offensive line because the team can’t pay for any real talent to keep him upright.

In short, the salary cap is going to mess this up.

It doesn’t have to. And before I get into my idea, let me just say that this isn’t the Chiefs’ fault. Mahomes was going to reset the market for quarterbacks no matter what. The only way to keep from paying him an outrageous per-year salary was to let him go and that would be simply insane. He’s the best quarterback in the league and all he has to do to retain that title is play exactly as good as he has the past two seasons.

But he won’t. Mahomes will get even better and that should make every other team in the league need a change of cargo shorts right now.

Kansas City aced the draft with Mahomes, pairing him with Andy Reid and they’ve reaped the rewards of a Super Bowl title. More are coming and the only thing that can derail it is the NFL salary cap sapping the Chiefs of all the talent surrounding Mahomes, forcing him to take the field with rookies and cheap, under-performing journeyman players.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

The NFL needs a salary cap. It helps promote parity and doesn’t allow teams to stockpile talent on the bench. It can also help tear a team to shreds because each franchise in the league is desperate to find a franchise quarterback. Once they do, the eventual contract of those quarterbacks puts those teams in immediate salary cap trouble. I have a solution.

The rule change I propose is that each team gets one salary cap exemption on a player originally drafted by that same team. This year the cap is 198,200,000. As of this writing, the Chiefs are looking at $6 million available, which should be enough to sign their rookie class. If they work a long-term contract with Chris Jones, they might be able spread it out far enough to fit it in, but that’s it.

Next year is going to be really tight, but that’s nothing outside the tsunami that’s going to hit in 2021 when Tyrann Mathieu, Eric Fisher, Travis Kelce, Mitchell Schwartz and Alex Okafor are all slated to hit free agency. And that’s not even counting any of the players they’ve drafted over the last couple of years that will be due significant pay increases.

With the exemption, Mahomes is off the books and the Chiefs can keep the players they want. Not only that, they can work free agency and add some players they might need.

Think about this — Sammy Watkins’ contract runs out after this year and while he’s been good with the Chiefs, they likely will let him walk. How would you like to see them add somebody like A.J. Green, T.Y. Hilton, Keenan Allen or JuJu Smith-Schuster in his place? Mahomes would like that quite a lot, I think. So would the NFL’s weekly highlight package.

It’s never going to happen without a cap exemption and in three years we’ll have to watch Mahomes spread it around to undrafted guys out of Tulane, Georgia State and James Madison. Nobody wants that. This is an easy fix and the league make it happen.

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