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The 4-0 Rams are a model to teams like the Bears and Browns, who are building around quarterbacks taken at or near the top of the draft. The Rams are structuring their extension schedule around Goff, who has two years and $16.5 million in cap charges remaining on his rookie deal. Los Angeles will have one more year of cost control in 2020 with Goff’s unguaranteed fifth-year option, which comes to more than $25 million, though teams traditionally use that year to sign their star quarterback to a long-term contract extension.
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How would a team even go about making the quarterback change?
Well, the first thing you do is scout. You have to think about this sort of move months in advance, extending through the college football season. You have to find a quarterback who you think is good enough to come in and take over for a successful starter, which means you have to scout as if you’re looking for a No. 1 quarterback. Remember that the Eagles, who were undergoing a regime change, re-signed Sam Bradford and gave Chase Daniel a lucrative deal for a backup before falling in love with Wentz and trading up with the Browns to make him the second overall pick.
You can make a case that a team might want to just draft a quarterback in the middle of the draft and see if it can develop him into a starter, as the Patriots did with Jimmy Garoppolo. I’m not as enthused by that idea, if only because quarterbacks taken after the first round don’t have a high success rate. The Patriots used the 62nd pick on Garoppolo, which was the highest selection they’ve used on a quarterback in the Brady era, but they didn’t get much out of passers they drafted in a similar range, like Ryan Mallett (74), Jacoby Brissett (91), and Kevin O’Connell (94). I think a team can make this sort of trade only if it is extremely confident it’s coming away with a franchise quarterback, as the Chiefs were with Mahomes.
As a result, you can’t really telegraph the move by acquiring your new quarterback a year in advance, unless you’re absolutely flush with draft picks like the early-’90s Cowboys or the pre-Dorsey Browns. If the Rams were going to trade Goff, as an example, they couldn’t trade up in the 2019 draft to grab a passer with the intention of letting him sit on the bench for a year before trading Goff in 2020. It would erode Goff’s confidence and dramatically reduce the team’s leverage when it did decide to make a trade.
So what sort of trade should the team make?
The solution, then, is that you trade your old starter for your new starter. If you are entering the fifth-year option of a first-round pick or the fourth year of a player taken after the first round, you should at least sniff around to see if there’s a quarterback you like at a price point you can afford.
Young, successful quarterbacks should be valuable enough to get just about any pick imaginable. The Patriots got only a second for Garoppolo last season during the final year of his contract, but that was after the Patriots waited until the last possible second to trade him, reportedly limited his market, and dealt a player who had thrown only 94 career passes.
Which team would be willing to make the plunge?
Let’s run through the eight teams with quarterbacks on rookie deals who aren’t actually in their debut seasons. Before we get started, to be clear, I’m not saying these teams should trade their quarterbacks. I’m just trying to figure out whether these teams would be viable for this sort of move given their circumstances.
The Rams are a great example of why this might make sense. Obviously, they have the personnel worth paying if those players continue to play at a high level around Jared Goff. Even if they re-sign players such as Marcus Peters, Cooper Kupp and Lamarcus Joyner to extensions over the next couple of seasons, the Rams will see Goff get expensive right around the time that they need to start rebuilding his offensive line after Andrew Whitworth and John Sullivan retire.
Sean McVay’s presence here is also critical. The 32-year-old coach isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and while his scheme could suddenly lose its effectiveness, McVay is already regarded as arguably the most impressive offensive mind in the league. He inherited Goff after a disastrous rookie season under Jeff Fisher’s reign in Los Angeles and immediately turned around the Cal product. The Rams added Sammy Watkins, Robert Woods and Kupp last offseason, but McVay is rightfully being lauded as the architect of Goff’s turnaround.
If McVay could do that with Goff, what’s to say he couldn’t pull it off with another young quarterback? I’m sure McVay loves his star pupil, but it’s not as if he drafted Goff. The 23-year-old continues to improve and is averaging in excess of nine yards per attempt so far this season, but what if the Rams could trade Goff in 2020, acquire a star rookie to place under McVay’s tutelage, and use the savings to go after a franchise left tackle or an edge rusher to play alongside Aaron Donald?
A trade like this would depend on how Goff develops. If he turns into a face-of-the-franchise superstar, I don’t think you could make a trade. If Goff settles in as a Tier II starter and fails to win a playoff game by the end of 2019? I don’t think the Rams would make that trade, but I don’t think they would be crazy to consider a swap under those circumstances if they see a passer they love at the top of the draft.
I can’t imagine the Eagles trading Carson Wentz. I suspect it would make Eagles fans very upset to suggest that they would consider trading Wentz. I’m not saying this to make Eagles fans upset, I promise. It also seems worth pointing out that the infrastructure they’ve built around Wentz was strong enough to win a Super Bowl after Wentz went down because of a torn ACL. That’s one of the hidden benefits of having a quarterback on a rookie deal. It’s easier to compete when you’re missing a player who costs $6 million in cap space (like Wentz) than it is when you lose a player who occupies $20.3 million in room, like Aaron Rodgers did a year ago, because you’re less likely to lose the multiple players you use that leftover $14.3 million on to injury.
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Like the Rams, the Eagles also have a great offensive mind in coach Doug Pederson. They already spend so much on their offensive and defensive line that they’re basically getting by with players on rookie contracts or otherwise modest deals at running back, cornerback and linebacker, with Nigel Bradham‘s deal really not kicking in until 2019 (unless the Eagles release him). The money for a Wentz deal is going to have to come at the expense of another position, probably wide receiver or safety.
Assuming Wentz returns to MVP-level form he was showing before the knee injury, he’s too good for the Eagles to trade. The best three or four quarterbacks in the league are perennially underpaid. Rodgers is making $33.5 million per year, and there are about 25 teams who would be delighted to pay him $40 million per year if they had the chance in free agency. The chances of finding a useful quarterback in the draft are one thing; the odds of finding an MVP, even at the top of the draft, are too low to forgo the one you have.
The Chiefs were already aggressive enough to make the move to go after Mahomes and trade away Alex Smith, which I think most teams would be afraid to try. That was under the Dorsey administration, but Andy Reid didn’t have any qualms about moving on from Donovan McNabb in his mid-30s, so perhaps it shouldn’t have been as surprising that the Chiefs made the move for Mahomes.
It’s still absolutely way too early to figure out what they might or might not do with Mahomes, who has been the best quarterback in football through three weeks. If Mahomes continues to play at this level, of course, there’s no way they could conceivably trade their budding franchise quarterback.
I don’t see this happening for a few reasons. One is that the futures of Mitchell Trubisky and general manager Ryan Pace seem tied together. If Trubisky develops into a star, Pace probably will want to keep him around, given that the former Saints executive loved Trubisky enough to trade up and draft the North Carolina product over Mahomes and Deshaun Watson. If Trubisky fails to develop, Pace probably will be fired and coach Matt Nagy will get to work with a new quarterback. In that scenario, Trubisky doesn’t have the trade value for this sort of deal to make sense.
This would depend on whether Deshaun Watson recaptures the level of play we saw during those first six starts of the 2017 season. In a similar vein to the Bears, Watson and Bill O’Brien are probably tied at the hip for the long term, given that new general manager Brian Gaine wasn’t in the organization when the Texans traded up to draft Watson. If Watson gets back to his old level of play, the Texans won’t be willing to deal him for anything. Anything less and a possible move would depend upon the makeup of the organization by the time we get to 2021, when Watson would be entering his fifth year as a pro.
Jameis Winston‘s future remains up in the air. There are certainly teams that wouldn’t want to trade for a player with Winston’s history of off-field misconduct toward women and make him the face of their franchise, and while Winston improved on the field last season, he’s sitting behind journeyman Ryan Fitzpatrick after his return from suspension. The idea of trading Winston and going after a new quarterback in next year’s draft to develop behind Fitzpatrick makes sense, but Winston doesn’t have the trade value to get the Bucs into the first round.
This could actually be quite interesting. The Tennessee braintrust of Jon Robinson and Mike Vrabel didn’t draft Marcus Mariota, who was taken out of Oregon in 2015. Mariota is already on his third coach and has certainly flashed moments of brilliance, but injuries and (arguably) subpar coaching have limited his effectiveness as a passer. New offensive coordinator Matt LaFleur seems like the most modern coach Mariota has been able to work with, but the 24-year-old suffered an elbow injury in the opener that has limited his ability to throw.
The Titans have their big decision with Mariota looming next spring. While it seems likely that Tennessee would be comfortable letting Mariota play out his fifth-year option at $20.9 million, have they been sufficiently impressed with Mariota to hand him a long-term contract approaching $30 million per season?
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To throw a scenario out there, former Oregon coach Mark Helfrich is now the offensive coordinator in Chicago. The Bears don’t have the draft picks to trade for Mariota after trading two first-rounders for Khalil Mack, but if Helfrich succeeds with Trubisky, he could become a hot head-coaching candidate by 2020. If the Titans don’t extend Mariota next offseason and let him play out his fifth-year option in advance of either franchising him, letting him go, or signing him to an extension after the 2019 season, would they consider franchising-and-trading him to Helfrich’s new digs in Cincinnati or Denver for a pick in the middle of the first round? This seems plausible, if not necessarily likely.
There’s certainly a subset of Cowboys fans who are frustrated with Dak Prescott. The third-year quarterback has produced middling numbers over the second half of 2017 and the first few games of 2018, although it’s also fair to note that he is throwing to what must surely be the least-imposing group of receivers in the league. Dez Bryant is only the most prominent ex-Cowboys player to raise concerns about the scheme from coach Jason Garrett and offensive coordinator Scott Linehan. Garrett has now lasted nine years in the job when no other head coach under Jerry Jones made it past year five, and while the former Cowboys quarterback won the division in 2016, he has won exactly one playoff game in nearly a decade.
Another disappointing season might be the end for Garrett, and while Prescott might not be at fault for the scheme or the receiving corps, Dallas’ starting quarterback could be scapegoated amid the regime change. It’s worth remembering that the Cowboys hardly fell in love with Prescott during the draft but instead took him in the fourth round after failing to move up and grab Paxton Lynch or Connor Cook. If Prescott has an uneven season and the Cowboys hire a coach like Jim Harbaugh or Urban Meyer, would they consider simultaneously making a change at quarterback?
Prescott’s timeline is accelerated by the nature of his contract; while he has been cheaper than the likes of Goff and Wentz over the course of his rookie deal, the lack of a fifth-year option in his contract means that the Cowboys have to start thinking about a Prescott extension this upcoming offseason. He would theoretically be an unrestricted free agent in 2020, and while the Cowboys could franchise Prescott, they might not want to start the Kirk Cousins Clock and risk upsetting a player who could be the most important piece of the franchise over the next decade.
There’s a possibility here, although Prescott probably has done enough to justify a long-term extension from the Cowboys, who will be in decent cap shape next season. If there are questions about Prescott’s ability to carry the team to a Super Bowl, he probably deserves a chance to pull it off with a receiving corps with better players than the ones he has had to work with as a pro. There’s also a chance that a new coach comes in and cleans house, sending Prescott away in the process.