Welcome to the Athletic Football Show.

I'm Robert Mays.

This is the third installment of our four-part series The Money Down, examining the business of the NFL.

I don't think you could do a mini-series about the business of the NFL without taking a closer look at the most important position in the league,

and by extension, the most important contracts in the league. Quarterback contracts have exploded over the past decade. Joe Burroughs

2020-23 extension paid him on average 24 and a half percent of the salary cap in place the

season he signed the deal. In 2014, Aaron Rogers led the league at 17.8%. Since the implementation of the rookie salary scale

with the 2010 collective bargaining agreement, quarterback contracts and rookie contract windows

have been a huge talking point with NFL team building. Maximizing the cheap years of your

young, talented quarterback is now seen as vital to team success, knowing that a potential

$60 million contract and a 600 to 1,000 percent raise is coming only a couple years down the

line. Today, we talked to Brad Spielberger, former cap analyst at Pro Football Focus, and current

director of football administration, a grand central sports management, about the landscape of huge

quarterback contracts.

And in some ways, we tried to interrogate the binary that's created around them.

Our massive quarterback deals really the roster building impediment that we make them out to be,

and our rookie contract window is really as valuable as we present them to be.

Along the way, as part of that discussion, we examined how and when Josh Allen and Patrick

Mahomes might try to push the quarterback markets to new height at some point in the next

couple years.

We talked about how an emergence of middle class quarterback contracts like the Geno Smith

and Baker-Mayfield deals may actually provide teams a new path moving forward and how

...