Patrick Mahomes' Monumental Contract Discussed in Sports Illustrated's Daily Cover Story
Following Laurent Duvernay-Tardif's Daily Cover story Wednesday, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and his new contract are the topic of Thursday's Sports Illustrated Daily Cover story.
Sports Illustrated's Greg Bishop tells the story of how the deal came about and what it means to Mahomes and his family.
The Contract instantly became a historical sports document, its parameters criticized by other agents, praised by Mahomes and celebrated by the beer manager and others throughout Chiefs Kingdom. The Contract could* be worth half a billion dollars and should* tie Mahomes to KC for the rest of his career. And, in a broader sense, The Contract would also be shown to embody both how NFL deals differ from agreements in other sports, and how they rarely deliver exactly as laid out.
Mahomes scribbled his name onto the white pages, making the document legal, securing mind-boggling, generational wealth. The whole group posed for pictures, cracking open the bubbly as general manager Brett Veach toasted to a future of Super Bowl championships like the one they nabbed back in February. Cabott thanked his counterparts from the negotiating table. Social distancing measures were taken because of COVID-19. Someone even saved the pen that Mahomes used as a memento. The only thing missing was one of those giant game-show checks.
Bishop explains how the talks from both sides regarding an extension started as early as January 2019. Mahomes' agents, Leigh Steinberg and Chris Cabott, are well-respected within the Chiefs' organization and it made things go smoother.
Steinberg and Cabott helped revolutionize the "contract game" as they put guaranteed mechanisms into Mahomes' contract.
Now, Team Mahomes sought to find a permissible route around that cash-up-front rule. They settled on a clunky term: guarantee mechanisms. Both Cabott and Steinberg describe it as the latest innovation in the evolution of pro football contracts. The first five years—and roughly $140 million—of Mahomes’s deal are guaranteed against injury. But for each year that he remains on the Chiefs’ roster, significant, eight-figure chunks—at least $21.7 million (’21) and as much as $49.4 million (’27)—become guaranteed. There are buyout opportunities, but those very guarantees make releasing Mahomes in any one season prohibitively expensive, which to his reps means that Mahomes basically signed a guaranteed contract, without the Chiefs needing to lay out over $400 million up front. In the improbable event he is let go, he would then hit the open market.
Mahomes did not take the same route as Kirk Cousins, who played out two franchise-tag seasons with the football team in Washington, then signed for three years in Minnesota for $84 million guaranteed, then renegotiated this spring to add two seasons but help the Vikings increase their 2020 cap space. Mahomes chose the opposite path to the same place.
The structure, Cabott says, borrowed from basketball in the guarantee mechanisms and from baseball in the no-trade clause the Chiefs agreed to, making it unlike any agreement in NFL history. Mahomes came to like the longer, more creative option best. “This way,” Cabott says, “he reset the market at the position and for the sport and for all of sports.”
The story dives deep Mahomes' contract while comparing and contrasting it to other big contracts in sports from Drew Bledsoe and Donovan McNabb to Mike Trout and Bobby Bonilla to understand the magnitude of the deal.
To read Bishop's full story on the impact of Mahomes' contract, click here.
