I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Taysom Hill will not be making $65 million as a quarterback.

Joking aside, this seems like a good idea to me.

What would be the incentive to not maxing out QB salary? With the full team cap, the incentive is being able to field a decent roster. Separate out the QBs and a guy like Jerry Jones will just go for broke every time. You could see teams with a star maxing one guy’s salary and using the bare minimum on a backup. There’d be a run on rookie QBs and journeymen backups (Fitz, Minshew, Dalton etc.) would get squeezed out.

On the players’ side, the NFLPA would not likely agree to something that’s just going to limit QB salaries. On top of that, by setting up a two categories of players, the proposal threatens player solidarity, which the NFLPA struggle with as it is.

Perhaps the owners advance this as a bargaining chip along with some of their money scrounging schemes like moar midweek football, expanded playoffs & seasons.

I agree with the QB cap, this is getting out of hand, if he's your franchise QB then a cap must be in place, or something has to be done to protect the team from running out of cap space because this is infinite if it continues, and it is detrimental to the game we love.

The owners could, you know, increase the salary cap. Take less profit. I know that sounds crazy to most of you, but the salary cap is an artificial number, and the owners could increase the piece of the pie that goes to salaries. The salary cap is important to keep some semblance of competitive balance, but each team's management of their salary situation is what separates the wheat from the chaff (along with smart personnel people)

If the owners increased the salary cap, they could (you know) spend more on players?

Being a union, the NFLPA could promote the usual demand for members' salaries: pay on the basis of seniority, not performance...like public school union teachers.

It's been very lucrative for the teachers' unions.

That would make the salary negotiations relatively easy as the cap would allocated among the workers based on years of service.

There are many long tenured, quality back up players in the NFL who toil away for years and barely make $5 Million/year.

(SARC...kind of)

There is an obvious problem with this. Once the QB is on a different salary cap, the team will have a lot more money to spend on the other players. Which would mean those other players and their agents would be looking to get more money. So instead of Jefferson getting that average of $35 million per year, that could well be bumped up to over $40 million. It's human nature. Maximize your income. And if someone says the players should take less because of the team, then the team should also honor the player's contract, and guarantee all the money.

NFL owners are being blackmailed.
They should want a separate Cap for Qbs.
But the biggest problem is why they want to pay
it anyway.
It said," everyone is replaceable."
Forget the market value, and cost averaging.
Show me the money says it all.
If you own a business, you protect it.
Greed means; you weren't raised right.
It's not for the Love of the game!
And the integrity of the NFL must prevail.

If the intent is to raise the salaries of some of those lesser paid players and positions (like RB or ILB) then I like the idea. So for example if the star QB made $10 mill less, the you could raise the salary of 5 other guys by $2 mill each. That’s a big raise for a player making $4 - 5 mill.

But I don’t think it would turnout that way . I think star LT and EDGE and WR would eat up all of the savings . So each of those guys might see a raise from $20 mill to $23 mill. That doesn’t seem to fix any problem IMHO.

Or... check this out:

You don't change anything.

Either teams are willing to pay out-of-balance contracts to elite QBs at the cost of not being able to field as competitive a team around them, or teams won't be willing to pay ridiculous cash to keep elite QBs because they feel they can build a more competitive team around a more affordable QB.

It's pretty simple. If teams find that paying X millions of dollars a year for a top level, big name QB but not having as much star power surrounding them is a viable business model, they will continue to pay it.

If teams decide the juice isn't worth the squeeze, they quit squeezing, and QBs in the NFL will either learn to live with smaller contracts, or they'll have to take up golf.

Making special, separate buckets for QB pay is perhaps the worst idea I've ever heard in sports cap management.

Why are NFL owners paying exorbitant salaries to the T. Lawrences, DeShaun Watson's, K. Cousin's, K. Murray's, B. Mayfield's, etc. of the world?
Have ANY QB's performed well after being 'paid'? Even good QBs such as Rodgers, Burrow, Hurts regressed or were out w/injuries.
Wake me up when teams/owners/players come to their senses. Yes, I'm annoyed @ the greed portrayed by most of them. I'm certain shady agents will circumvent any new agreements.

Rather than have a QB salary cap, they could just have a rule that no one player could earn any more than X percentage of the salary cap. This way, you wouldn't have to worry about the definition of a QB.

Having said that, I think the whole thing is a terrible idea anyway. The Browns were crazy to give Deshaun Watson that huge contract, and now they are suffering the consequences. As they should be. And yes, Trevor Lawrence is more valuable than Justin Jefferson. It's much easier to build a team around a quarterback than a wide receiver. The quarterback is the centerpiece of the offense. Rules that are designed to protect quarterbacks from injury have made them more valuable because they don't miss as many games as they used to, and their careers are longer.

It's a complicated issue, and rarely does doing one thing resolve a complicated issue. A QB cap would create other issues, unintended consequences. This is why freer markets of roughly equal participants work; no one can plan and implement a system that anticipates everything with any degree of certainty or effectiveness.

Worse, this market is nowhere near free and balanced. There is collusion among employers combined with a collective agreement among employees to yield an uneasy truce and, simultaneously, a wildly free market for a small number of astronomically expensive employees which blows the wage scale apart.

Split the cap, raise the cap... would change only the numbers. The underlying disruptive forces would remain.

All markets have underlying disruptive forces to some degree, but summer is not the time to discuss economics. So how's this:

Gute: How does $50 million sound, Jordan?
Love: I think I can live on 35. You spread the rest around getting and keeping good players for year after year Super Bowl runs.

This salary cap crap for QBs sounds like forced altruism or another way of enforcing equality where it simply doesn't exist. The Owners of some teams, many others at times have created this problem by paying the lesser more, and now want to pay less to the actual earners to create a more 'equal' field, though equality ends at being a human being. Yes, other positions have players as important to the team as the QB, but those positions aren't equal.

I don't like where the number is going for a QB, but I won't deny any who is actually worth it, though that is an individual opinion which we will all believe to be the correct one, although that itself seems to be getting taken away from us.

I read that Prescott wants $60 million a year. I wouldn't pay that, or close to it, but I have no issue with some team doing so, but the damage it does to the other teams by such idiocy cannot be ignored. The reasons should be self-evident.

A rising tide should raise all ships, but inhibiting the flow of the tide will surely bog down many of them. QBs should be selfish, deciding which selfish QB deserves it is the problem. The Cowboys are a prime example, especially if they concede $60 million, much less what he gets already.

As long as the NFL has fans like me who love the game and will pay for season tickets that go up in price on a regular basis and viewers who pay for NFL Sunday Ticket at $449 for 2024 and seems to go up every year, the salary cap will continue to increase. The negotiated shares of the salary cap is contractually agreed upon between the owners and the players union. With more money being available with the increasing salary cap, player contracts will increase accordingly.

Who knows what the limit will be, but economically there is always a diminishing returns involved as the cost of anything which continues to increase at a pace we have seen with the NFL. Perhaps, as an example, the NFL will become so costly that many fans will turn to watching golf matches on TV as opposed to paying $600 or so for an NFL Sunday Ticket subscription and NFL revenue will fail to increase or perhaps even decrease.

A breaking point does exist, but it appears it has not yet been reached and until it does, there will be guys like me and perhaps you who continue to live with the price increases while we grin and bear it as we watch quarterbacks get paid $50 million and more to play the game we love and played as kids.

I chuckled a bit when I saw the headline. What the owners are saying is they can't control themselves at the figurative quarterback buffet table so they need a salary cap cop to stop them.

They keep bringing in more streaming revenue which raised the amount of cash in the NFL coffers. The players notice this then want their share which is understandable.
So who pays for all this? Two sources: companies that pay outrageous fees to the NFL and customers at home and the stadium.
One thing to always remember is the revenue that runs things comes from all of us in one form or another. The question is: have things gotten out of hand?

The NFL knows many fans would do nearly anything to see the games and cynically keep making it more costly for the average fan to participate. I don't want to miss the Packers in Brazil so I joined Peacock. I'm as much at fault and anyone.

My fear is the Golden Goose is eventually going to be cooked by pure greed.

Personally I think it's an unenforceable and terrible idea. Imagine though if the quarterback was given say $90 mill and told that is for their salary and any skill players. I wonder what percent the qb would keep

I hate Hate HATE the idea of a separate salary cap. If your team pays top dollar for an elite QB, the rest of the team should be filled with less compensated (worse) players at other positions. It helps keep parity in the league, which is the best thing the NFL has going for it.

I wouldn't want Kansas City to pay top dollar for Mahomes and to also have the same amount of money as the Packers for the rest of their players as the Packers do for all non-QBs. That's absurd.

Kinda sounds like the old debate about outrageous corporate CEO compensation, and efforts to limit it to x% of average employee compensation.

This is an awful idea. How about GMs just do their job a little better and stop bending over every time a QB shows the slightest ability and sign over the cap. The cap is about the whole team and I doubt there is a compromise the owners will want to make and that doesn't take away from the pool for the rest of the players. In the end the CBA will split revenue between players and owners and that will never take into consideration who gets what the owners don't. In the more the QBs take in any format will still result in less for the other positions. Owners aren't going to pay QBs out of their own pocket so this seperations doesn't do anything in the end.