How Patrick Mahomes became sports’ richest man on a team-friendly contract for Chiefs
Patrick Mahomes had already flipped a franchise’s painful playoff past on its tail, helped force the NFL commissioner into an apology and turned the Chiefs — the Chiefs! — into the league’s hottest brand.
So maybe this is all just different forms of the impossible, but here is an all-timer:
He just became the richest athlete in global sports history on a team-friendly contract.
Let that truth sink in.
Mahomes has said — before and after signing that 10-year extension worth up to $503 million — that he wanted to be sure his salary left enough money for his teammates.
We now see an immediate consequence of Mahomes’ decision to prioritize long-term stability over demanding whatever his full market value would be.
His deal leaves the Chiefs’ salary cap virtually unchanged over the next two seasons. That means an historic contract will not hinder the Chiefs’ ability to sign star defensive lineman Chris Jones to a long-term extension before the Wednesday NFL deadline.
That’s important for more than the obvious reasons. Part of Mahomes’ value is his leadership, a tantalizing blend of contagious confidence — what’s been described as “athletic arrogance” — balanced with a we’re-in-this-together vibe that would’ve been undermined at least a little with a contract that pushed Jones out.
Mahomes avoided that potential internal conflict.
The NFL’s salary cap typically goes up by 5 percent or more every year. Next season will almost certainly be an exception, with revenues expected to drop because of coronavirus complications. That’s the extent of the added difficulty of extending Jones.
Mahomes’ bigger cap hits won’t come until the 2022 season, which was always going to be the case with his rookie contract expiring.
The Chiefs will benefit from fortunate timing here, because NFL revenues — and, by extension, the salary cap — are expected to significantly jump with the league’s TV contracts expiring after the 2022 season.
In theory, then, the Chiefs could offer Jones a deal that used his $16.1 million salary and cap hit for 2020 and backloaded other payments to the bigger salary cap of 2023.
Jones wants around $21 million per season, but the Chiefs now have a compelling argument that did not exist last week — if the league’s best player at the most important position structured a deal to accommodate other spending, couldn’t you do the same?
This isn’t the only way Mahomes’ contract appears to be team friendly. Calculations by ESPN’s Bill Barnwell showed that Mahomes will make just $14.7 million more in new money over the next four seasons when compared to Jared Goff’s extension and adjusted for cap inflation.
Ask yourself: Is Mahomes worth $3.7 million more per season than Goff?
When you’re done laughing, consider that a more traditional and short-term focused extension could’ve been for four years at around $160 million. But Mahomes’ deal will pay $114 million in new money across the first three seasons.
Deshaun Watson and Dak Prescott — productive but objectively inferior players to Mahomes — could each soon sign deals that will pay them more in the short term.
While Watson and Mahomes came out of the same draft class, the comparison with Prescott isn’t completely even because his rookie contract expired. Mahomes could’ve taken this negotiation to that point and likely earned more money.
That’s one reason Chiefs GM Brett Veach called this “a legacy contract,” and not “a cash contract.”
A few things to keep in mind.
Mahomes is extremely unlikely to play out the entirety of this contract. The framework gives him unprecedented levels of security and stability, but also opportunities to restructure for any number of reasons — injury, diminished production or an exploded salary cap that makes him underpaid in the back half of the deal.
One clear mile marker for restructure would be after the 2025 season but before March 2026, when his 2027 salary and cap hit of $59.95 million would be guaranteed.
At that point, the rest of his contract would be for six years and $294.2 million. That’s $49 million per season, but one agent this week guessed the salary cap would be between $300 million and $350 million by then.
If that’s true, Mahomes’ average salary would project between 14 and 16.3 percent — in line with a salary between $27.7 million and $32.3 million in 2020.
With the cap presumably still increasing every year, an average salary of $49 million from 2026 to 2031 could be reasonably described as a bargain.
At the risk of repeating ourselves here: Let that truth sink in.
Look, Mahomes did not take a hometown discount. That’s a false construct anyway — have you taken 20 percent less to stay with the same job? — and unfair to expect of men who sacrifice to reach the top of their fields and usually have just one chance at the big payday.
But in practical terms, Mahomes did something just as helpful for the Chiefs’ charge of surrounding him with as much talent as possible.
This contract gives the Chiefs long-term cost certainty, won’t take up a disproportionate chunk of the cap and, more importantly, locks in the game’s best quarterback for the NFL equivalent of a lifetime.
Mahomes is so talented, and such a clear force multiplier, that he could’ve taken more money and the Chiefs would’ve had to view it as the price of retaining the NFL’s ultimate advantage.
But he didn’t, agreeing instead to a structure that ensures at least two things: The next Mahomes descendant who won’t have a good Christmas is a few hundred years from being born, and if the Chiefs don’t field a good roster it’ll be the front office’s fault and not Mahomes’.
Now, facing no additional obstacles to signing Jones long-term is not the same thing as signing him long-term. The Chiefs’ best chance to get this done evaporated when they traded for Frank Clark and gave him the contract Jones wanted.
By any reasonable definition, that was the right call — the Chiefs won the dang Super Bowl, after all.
The likeliest outcome has always been that Jones plays at least part of the 2020 season under the franchise tag, and then does what Clark did — signs a big contract with a new team, with the Chiefs getting draft picks in exchange.
But what we know now is that if Jones does end up somewhere else next fall, it won’t be because of Mahomes.
More importantly, that will remain true for anyone else Mahomes plays with for the next 12 years.