Patrick Mahomes could be the NFL’s first $200 million man — and soon

Over the past two seasons, Patrick Mahomes has established himself as one of the most valuable players in the NFL. He led the Chiefs to their first Super Bowl win in 50 years. Despite this, he was paid less than $4.5 million in 2019 — 32nd-most among all quarterbacks and 343rd among all active players.

That’s going to change in a big way. The question is whether it happens this offseason or next. Mahomes’ absurd play and his looming free agency mean the Chiefs will have to hand him a significant contract extension in the next 20 months or risk alienating him and pushing him toward free agency.

That’s a risk neither side would like to take — and it should mean 2018’s NFL MVP and this year’s Super Bowl MVP will become the highest-paid player in league history in 2020.

The young quarterback will count just $5.2 million against Kansas City’s salary cap next season, the fourth year of his rookie contract. That’s a smaller payday than 26 other 2020 quarterbacks including Ryan Fitzpatrick, Jacoby Brissett, and Nick Foles.

He’s set to make less than 10 other members of his own roster, including targets Tyreek Hill, Travis Kelce, and Sammy Watkins. He’ll also be eligible for a fifth-year team option in 2021 that will clock in somewhere around $22 million — a number Kansas City would be happy to pay.

Allowing Mahomes to play out the entirety of his rookie deal would help retain cap space for a team without much spending money moving forward. The quarterback’s small paychecks have created breathing room needed to sign or extend veteran help on both sides of the ball, including players like Tyrann Mathieu, Anthony Hitchens, and Watkins. As a result, the franchise is expected to have a shade under $19 million to spend next offseason, or less than all but six other teams in 2020.

That means managing costs will be a priority this spring. Even so, Kansas City needs to strike a balance between being frugal with a stuffed salary cap and rewarding an unpaid, overdelivering talent.

Team chairman Clark Hunt says an extension is coming, but that it may not necessarily be in 2020. That’s because he understands a failure to lock Mahomes in to a market-value contract could end in disaster for the Chiefs.

Washington showed the league how to effectively alienate itself from an emerging young quarterback with its insistence to not give Kirk Cousins a big extension when his rookie deal expired in 2016. Instead, the club re-upped him for one year under its franchise player tag, then did so again in 2017, effectively severing contract talks between the two sides. Two years and nearly $44 million later, Cousins bolted to Minnesota as a free agent.

Kansas City probably won’t screw up its management as thoroughly as Washington did. There a large gap in talent between “pretty good” Cousins and a perennial MVP threat like Mahomes, who is the first Chiefs QB in 50 years to lead his team to the Super Bowl. Additionally, few teams are able to capture former Washington general manager Bruce Allen’s thorough commitment to engendering bad will from every inch of his atmosphere.

Rather than let money separate the team from its first homegrown playoff QB since Len Dawson, Kansas City will either have to pay up for his services or become the laughing stock of the NFL.

Why would Mahomes get paid two years before he’s scheduled to hit free agency? Because it:

a) Rewards his stellar play and builds a stronger relationship between team and player (while showing fans how much a franchise cares about its most important athlete).

b) Allows the club greater flexibility in spreading out that player’s gigantic bonuses and yearly salaries to gently massage his cap hit over the years.

We’ve seen this quite a bit recently. Jared Goff was three years into his NFL career when he earned a four-year, $134 million extension, two seasons before he was slated to hit free agency. Like Mahomes, he was a former first-round pick who had taken his team to the Super Bowl in his third season as a pro. Carson Wentz, drafted one spot after Goff, also got a nine-figure payday with a four-year, $128 million contract following his third season.

Goff’s deal pushed his biggest single-season cap hit to 2019 so the Rams could get it out of the way while they had space to burn. Wentz’s deal went the other way for a cash-strapped Eagles, actually reducing his cap hit last season but deferring larger payments into the future.

Franchise quarterbacks who weren’t taken in the first round — and thus don’t have fifth-year team options available to them in their rookie contracts — have been on similar schedules. Derek Carr got a five-year, $125 million deal from the Raiders after his third season in the league. Russell Wilson was handed an $87 million extension the summer before his rookie contract was set to expire, then given $140 million last spring when his previous big-money deal was a year away from tolling.

There are exceptions to this rule. Dak Prescott is hurtling toward free agency in 2020 after four strong years as the Cowboys’ starting quarterback. Even so, recent trends suggest Mahomes is more likely to get paid this spring/summer than he is in 2021 or 2022.

Mahomes, barring an unexpected turnaround, will be the highest-paid player in NFL history.

Cousins’ three-year, $84 million deal with the Vikings made Mahomes’ upcoming deal a little more difficult to predict since it’s the only fully guaranteed megadeal the modern NFL has ever seen. Still, we can take a look back at Goff, Wentz, and Wilson to better understand what lies ahead for the big-armed passer.

The NFL’s largest overall contract belongs to Matt Ryan at five years and $150 million, but that $30 million per-year average only ranks sixth. Wilson’s four-year, $140 extension from the spring of 2019 grants him a league-high average annual windfall of $35 million. Mahomes is younger than either of those quarterbacks and is still growing as a passer. That means he’s not just going to break the record for the league’s most valuable contract — he’s likely going to shatter it.

Early reports suggest that deal will wind up somewhere in the range of five years and $40 million per season. It would be a record-setting deal, but lesser quarterbacks earn record-setting contracts almost every year. The more meaningful number will be 80 percent. That’s the amount of practical guarantees the young QB and his agent will be looking for.

As of January 2020, only two quarterbacks in the league — Goff and Wentz — have contracts valued at more than $100 million with more than 80 percent of that money tied up in practical guarantees. Both of them got to the Super Bowl, at least technically, but failed to win it. Mahomes has summited that mountain — and that should add a little extra cash to his guaranteed base.

Though he hasn’t commented publicly about his upcoming contract negotiations, it’s probably safe to say that’s a target Mahomes would like to hit. A market-value contract for his MVP-caliber services wouldn’t just include $200 million over five years, but also the Chiefs’ assurances that his contract will be spread out to make something like $160 million of that practically guaranteed.

Five years, $200 million for Mahomes. That’s an expensive price for a young quarterback. He’ll probably be worth every penny.