“Obviously it’s important to me,” he said during a recent interview with ESPN radio in Wisconsin. “Obviously I’d love to finish my career here. But I’m busy right now. I’m being a leader on this team. I’m focused on being the quarterback of the team. And if nothing gets done, it won’t change anything because all I’m worried about right now is playing ball. If something does get done, that’s fantastic. It’s great. Then I’d think about, you know, that I can finish my career here, hopefully. And, you know, that changes the down-the-line stuff. The legacy stuff can be even more important now. But I’m not even thinking about that.”<doc-sep>Quarterback salaries are a succinct way to teach someone that life is not fair. There is no good reason Eli Manning should make more guaranteed money than Odell Beckham Jr., but he does because he’s a quarterback. The same will probably be true whenever Khalil Mack gets paid something less than Derek Carr. Case Keenum will make the exact same money as J.J. Watt this season. The Ringer’s 2018 NFL Preview Check out all of The Ringer’s coverage leading up to kickoff Even within the world of quarterbacks, there is little order to things: Jimmy Garoppolo, Matthew Stafford, Derek Carr, and Joe Flacco are not the four best quarterbacks in the NFL, but they were set to be the four highest-paid quarterbacks this season — before today. That’s because today, for however briefly, the financial hierarchy makes sense: Aaron Rodgers is the highest-paid quarterback in the world. On Wednesday, Rodgers finalized a new deal that guarantees him $103 million and will keep the 34-year-old in Green Bay through 2023. Rodgers kept his promise to deliver details of the news to former Packers receiver James Jones, who now works for NFL Network and was the first to report the impressive details. ESPN says the deal can be worth up to $180 million. Rodgers will receive $67 million before the end of the year and an additional $13 million before next spring. He joins Matt Ryan as the only other player on a contract worth $100 million guaranteed, though Ryan’s deal is for five years and maxes out at $150 million. The Rodgers contract does two things: It creates cost certainty for the Packers’ salary cap situation, and it makes Rodgers a very rich man. The dollar value is notable, but there are no opt-outs, nothing tied to a percentage of the salary cap, and nothing that adjusts the contract if he’s not the highest-paid quarterback, all of which had been speculated by the media in recent weeks. As far as the structure goes, this one won’t break the mold. Rodgers said last week that his goal for the deal was to make both sides happy, and it accomplishes that. Rodgers will make more money from the sport of football than any player ever, and the Packers didn’t have to fundamentally change the sport to do it. The lesson we learned on Wednesday is the lesson we learned over the summer when Ryan signed his deal, in the spring when Kirk Cousins signed his deal, or when Matthew Stafford signed his deal last summer. There is no quarterback bubble; the price for a quarterback is not flattening or falling. Rodgers’s eye-popping salary number, like all quarterback numbers, will look normal within a few years or sooner as the salary cap continues to rise by around $10 million each season. Despite what Josh Norman told me the league should do, there will not be an official or unofficial cap on quarterback pay. There are two NFLs: quarterbacks and the rest of the league. Don’t try to compare the numbers; you’ll just end up more confused than when you started. When Ndamukong Suh did his deal in Miami, he got 86% of the APY of the top QB contract at the time. With Aaron Rodgers' new deal, the top non-QB (Von Miller) will be making 57% of what the top QB gets. That gap is now a gulf. — Albert Breer (@AlbertBreer) August 29, 2018 The Philadelphia Eagles were the 1-seed in the NFC because they had an MVP candidate at quarterback in Carson Wentz, and they won the Super Bowl because they had a very good backup. Nick Foles likely cannot replicate his Super Bowl MVP–winning performance (373 yards, three touchdowns) over 16 games, but it doesn’t matter because their insurance policy already paid out. It might seem like the Eagles won the Super Bowl because quarterbacks are replaceable, but really they won because they had two good ones. Now, everyone else is following suit. The Saints sent a third-round pick to the Jets on Wednesday for Teddy Bridgewater and a sixth-rounder. The Saints, of course, have Drew Brees, so Bridgewater will be the backup. Bridgewater will be an NFL starter again, though; he was good with the Vikings and looked good enough with the Jets to start for a lot of NFL teams. If this weren’t such an unusual year, one in which nearly every team mapped out a defensible plan at quarterback months ago, Bridgewater would be starting for someone this season. He is signed only through this year, so barring a big extension for him (which is unlikely given that Brees’s cap number is $33.5 million), New Orleans just gave up a fairly high pick for a very nice one-year insurance policy. A few years ago, Tom Moore, then the offensive coordinator for the Indianapolis Colts, told Ron Jaworski how teams used to view their backup quarterbacks. Jaworski and Jon Gruden asked Moore why Peyton Manning’s backup never gets snaps in practice. Moore said that if Manning went down, the team was “fucked. And we don’t practice fucked.” In essence, teams are now practicing fucked. So now we wait for NFL teams to do what they always do: keep allocating more and more capital to quarterbacks. Former NFL executive Joe Banner said that as the cap nears $200 million (it was around $100 million just six years ago), “nobody should be surprised by the size of these deals and ones that will be completed soon.” Rodgers will go down as the first quarterback to get this much money, but it won’t take more than a few seasons for him to be surpassed by a lesser quarterback (since almost everyone else is a lesser quarterback). Jason Fitzgerald of Over the Cap said that Rodgers’s deal reminds him of the Green Bay passer’s 2013 deal, where he “takes a contract that really doesn’t push the market enough.” That deal, he said, is why most quarterback deals were stuck together for a few years — mostly between $15 million and $20 million. Cousins’s and Ryan’s deals pushed the market into the mid-20s over the length of their deals. Rodgers will average over $30 million in each year of his deal. Right now, it’s a historic amount of money. By the end of his four-year extension, Rodgers’s deal will not even look all that wild given how much the cap will rise. Hell, even by today’s standards it’s worth it: Aaron Rodgers has missed 18 games since becoming the starter in 2008 and the Packers are 6-11-1 (.361 win pct) in those games. Green Bay is 94-48 (.662 win pct) when he starts. #WorthEveryPenny — Evan Kaplan (@EpKap) August 29, 2018 When it comes to paying quarterbacks, there are two ways to win: One is to not do it (hopefully this entails a productive player on a rookie deal) and win with a deep roster built with the money you would have paid your quarterback. The other is to pay your quarterback everything, but have that quarterback be someone like Rodgers, who’s good enough to make up for a thinner roster. There will be about a $33 million disparity between what the Cowboys and Packers pay their quarterbacks, and both approaches can make sense. The Packers had no choice but to pay Rodgers, because the eventual alternative was something no team has done in the modern era: willingly let go of a quarterback without a concrete plan to replace him. It has never happened. And that’s not likely to change anytime soon.<doc-sep>Last updated on .From the section American football Aaron Rodgers is a two-time MVP Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers will become the highest paid player in NFL history, after agreeing a four-year contract extension reported to be external-link worth $134m (£103m). The 34-year-old will reportedly earn more than $80m by March 2019. The new deal surpasses that of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan, who held the previous record. Rodgers led the Packers to the Super Bowl championship in 2011, where he was also named most valuable player. The two-time MVP has spent his career at the Packers since being selected in the first round of the 2005 NFL draft. Rodgers, who still had two years remaining on his contract, is now under contract through 2023, when he will turn 40. On Monday, Odell Beckham Jr signed a five-year contract extension at the New York Giants worth a reported $95m (£73.7m), making him the highest-paid wide receiver in NFL history.<doc-sep>
Aaron Rodgers is the highest-paid player in the National Football League for a second time in his career, and if he plays at the same kind of level Tom Brady is pioneering at 41 years old, it won’t be the last time he gets a big payday. Rodgers and the Packers agreed to a four-year, $134-million contract extension that can be worth up to $180 million if he hits all his incentives, per ESPN. Rodgers gets $67 million in guaranteed money by the end of this calendar year, and he’ll eventually make $80 million total by the start of the new league year on March 17, 2019. The deal, which was struck with two years left on Rodgers’s current contract, will keep the franchise quarterback in Green Bay through the 2023 season, during which he’ll turn 40 years old. The two-time MVP has the best passer rating (103.8) in NFL history, the highest touchdown percentage (6.4) among all active quarterbacks and the lowest interception percentage (1.6) in league history. The Packers have made the playoffs every year except last year since Rodgers’s second season as the starter in 2009, and won the Super Bowl in ’10. In 2017 Rodgers broke his collarbone in the sixth game of the season. He returned in Week 15 when the 7-6 Packers had an outside chance at the playoffs, but a 31-24 loss at Carolina ended the Packers’ playoff hopes and Rodgers’s season. Five NFL Storylines We Should Have Been Talking About This Summer Rodgers told our Albert Breer that he wants to start in the 2024 season, and if that holds up, Rodgers—who has made $138.7 million in career earnings before this contract—could surpass Peyton Manning in career on-field earnings. Manning made an NFL-high $248.7 million in on-field earnings in his 18-season career. This offseason, Kirk Cousins changed the game for quarterbacks (especially free-agent quarterbacks) when he signed a three-year deal worth $84 million in fully guaranteed money. Later, Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan became the highest-paid player when he inked a $150-million extension with Atlanta. Both the Packers and Rodgers expressed a hope all offseason to get a deal done, and it was widely understood that the total money and guaranteed money of this deal would surpass both quarterbacks, who combined have one MVP title and no rings. Back in 2013, Rodgers signed a five-year extension with the Packers worth $110 million, making him the highest-paid player at that time, right around when top-tier quarterbacks were starting to break the $20 million per year barrier. Five years later, Rodgers and Ryan have shattered the $30 million per year barrier. As the salary cap continues to rise, and as quarterback remains the most important position in all of sports, could $40 million per year for a quarterback be in the near future?