Patrick Mahomes is Worth His Half-Billion Dollar Contract (and More)
The date is July 6th, 2020. It's an ordinary Monday with not much to do. I was preparing to watch a Premier League soccer match between Tottenham Hotspur and Everton at 2 PM. A tweet from Tim Grunhard at 1:19 PM catches my attention, discussing good news ahead in the Patrick Mahomes front. This put me on alert for the time being. At 1:54 PM, Adam Schefter broke the news. The Chiefs signed quarterback Patrick Mahomes to a 10-year contract with historic numbers: a record $503 million total with $477 million in guaranteed mechanisms, a $10 million signing bonus, and up to $25 million in incentives based on Super Bowl appearances and regular-season MVP awards.
My interest in the soccer match plummeted.
This deal for Mahomes surpasses many other historic deals, such as the 13-year, $325 million deal for Giancarlo Stanton (MLB), the 13-year, $330 million deal for Bryce Harper (MLB), the 11-fight, $365 million deal for Saul "Canelo" Alvarez (Boxing) and the 12-year, $426.5 million deal for Mike Trout (MLB). As great as all of these athletes are, among the team sports athletes, only Mahomes has had major success on the big stage and an undeniably large impact on his team's success.
In 162 games, the career-highs in Fangraphs' version of Wins Above Replacement (WAR) for Trout, Stanton and Harper average out at 8.9. In 16 games in 2018, Mahomes put up 4.4 WAR in Pro Football Focus' version of the stat. With just a tenth of the games played, Mahomes puts up half of the winning impact on his team compared to the career-bests of the three-highest paid baseball players.
Mahomes is the most impactful player playing the most impactful position in America's most popular sport.
Mahomes' contract is also incredible when widening the scope. Among the 50 largest contracts in American team sports, Mahomes is the only NFL player there, alongside 33 MLB players and 16 NBA players. No NFL player has ever been paid like Mahomes and that's how it should be. Mahomes hit the perfect time to sign the first half-billion-dollar American sports contract and he achieved it through a historic start to a career. He is the youngest QB to win a Super Bowl and an NFL regular-season MVP, the only QB that PFF has given Elite grades in their first two seasons as a starter, and he is still just 24 years old. This kind of production and team success from this early into a career has only come from the likes of Wayne Gretzky, Lionel Messi, Pele and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Mahomes is well on his way to joining this rare group, despite the amount of cap space he takes.
PFF has released multiple articles discussing this scenario, including a new one discussing the deal where they state that this contract is a bargain. Additionally, PFF's Eric Eager told Soren Petro of Sports Radio 810 WHB that, with a $200 million cap, they have a value of $80 million per year for Mahomes. Eager also released an article back in May debunking some common myths involving highly-paid quarterbacks and giving numerous data points in favor of giving large contracts to Mahomes, Houston Texans QB Deshaun Watson and Dallas Cowboys QB Dak Prescott.
Do not fret about Mahomes' contract. If anything, the numbers state that $503 million over the next 12 years could be a bargain for the Chiefs. Mahomes could be worth closer to $1 billion over 12 years considering his greatness, his production, and the way the quarterback market goes. As Chiefs fans, we should be jubilant. We have the greatest quarterback in NFL history on our team for the next 12 years and counting.
