We were waiting for the dominoes to start falling. Two big ones did Tuesday.
With Aaron Rodgers’s returning to the Packers and Russell Wilson’s heading to the Broncos, we’re starting to get some clarity on the NFL’s quarterback market. So I figured we’d kick off this week’s mailbag—we’ll get to your questions—with a quick FAQ section on what Tuesday’s news means for the NFL landscape.
I don’t think so. But it’s always possible someone could come along, blow Brian Gutekunst away and pry the 2020 first-round pick from the Packers. More realistic is that Love, whose trade value isn’t great right now (I had execs estimate he’s worth a third- or a fourth-rounder a month ago), will stay on for the third year of his rookie contract. Maybe he’ll play really well in the preseason, and the Packers will get a better offer. Maybe he won’t.
Either way, the Packers protect themselves by keeping him. They give themselves a layer of depth. They also cover themselves against the possibility Rodgers retires after next season.
The real decision point comes after Love’s third year, when the team will need to make a call on his fully guaranteed option for 2024. At that point, if the decision is to pick up the option, and it’s likely to be set above $20 million, then it’d be time to put him on the block.
Really, it doesn’t. The team restructured a bunch of contracts to make everyone fit under the cap last year, and it’ll presumably do that again with Rodgers, Davante Adams and a few others. The team has already restructured the deals of David Bakhtiari, Aaron Jones and Kenny Clark over the last few weeks, so that work’s underway.
It’s not dissimilar to how the Buccaneers built around Tom Brady, with voidable years tacked onto veterans’ contracts providing for space now and creating dead cap later. As I said the last couple of years with Tampa, if you’ve got a quarterback like that, it’s worth doing it to chase championships.
The Broncos, obviously, didn’t just push a button Tuesday and get it done. But Russell Wilson let those around him know Denver was at the top of his wish list, if the Seahawks were to trade him—he didn’t actively try to force a trade, content to let the situation play out. So the GMs, George Paton and John Schneider, had been working on this one for a while.
No one will admit it, but it’s not hard to ascertain that clarity in the Rodgers situation helped to push this one over the goal line.
There’s been a feeling for a while, going back to the last negotiation in 2019, that this would be Wilson’s last contract in Seattle. He had two years left on it, which really made this the optimal time to deal him, because it allowed for another team to acquire him without having to do a new contract right way. That boosted his trade value. This trade wasn’t unlike the Matthew Stafford trade in that way.
And if we’re being honest, Seattle’s roster is in need of a lot of work (Pete Carroll just had his worst season, at any level, in 27 years), and enough so that there had to be some doubt whether the team would be good enough to truly contend before Wilson’s contract was up.
This gives the Seahawks a chance to do a more deliberate build. They didn’t have a first-round pick (thanks to the Jamal Adams trade), and they do now; and they’ve got two coming in 2023, plus two second-round picks and a quarterback (Drew Lock) with plenty of physical ability who can start for them right away. And again, to look at this realistically, it has to be through the prism where Wilson wasn’t signing another contract there.
If you assume that and consider that Wilson had control over his destination, then this isn’t a bad way for Seattle to exit from the Wilson era.
For the former, it’s pretty simple: everything Tom Brady got without having to switch teams. If you examine the last 13 months, you’ll see the Packers strayed from their more conservative model and, like we said, started building for the here and now. They were aggressive with in-season veteran opportunities out there (Randall Cobb, Whitney Mercilus, Jaylon Smith). And they had a loaded roster to begin with.
For the latter, it begins with a fresh start. There was a lot of history between Wilson and the Seattle brass, from his entry to the league to how the Legion of Boom guys saw him to the end of that era and the more recent tumult (that included extended contract negotiations that got very public). In Denver, all of that is erased. He enters the organization in a much different spot than he did Seattle and should have a golden opportunity to lead as a result.
And, yes, there’s the Brady thing, too. In fact, in both of these cases, I think, a year ago, you had quarterbacks who looked at how the Bucs built and won around Brady and said, Now, both have it.
On to your mail …
