The salaries of NFL coaches will soon explode

Smith: Mark J. Rebilas / USA TODAY Sports

With a week left in NFL off-season programs …

• It’s something I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time: a market correction can and should come for NFL coaches.

I’ll take Sean Payton’s example here to give context. The Florida Sun-Sentinel He announced on Monday that the former Saints coach had been offered a five-year, $ 100 million deal at a Miami job earlier this year. I was told that the offer itself was over $ 100 million four years. And before that, in New Orleans, I think Payton was in a five-year deal worth $ 80 million when it all came together.

So he went from $ 16 million to $ 25 million. Sounds like a lot? But is it? Take a look at the economy of the NFL and you might be headed in a different direction here. The league drops $ 18 billion a year. There are 15 (!) Quarterbacks for $ 25 million or more each, and it makes one double. Aaron Donald, Tyreek Hill, Davante Adams, DeAndre Hopkins, Joey Bosa, Cooper Kupp, AJ Brown and Myles Garrett are also there. Roger Goodell earns $ 63.9 million a year.

Do you think Payton’s numbers aren’t there yet?

After all, most people in the NFL would say that the quarterback is the most important person in a team’s football, the coach is the second. So I would say that it makes a lot of sense or that an elite coach would be closer to what a starting quarterback is worth, a lot of coaches with less than $ 10 million a year if you consider how each team needs it. split his cake the fortune of professional football.

As far as I can see, the accounts are coming. Payton has the lever because he already has the money, and if he decides to return it aside, he will have several suitors. Sean McVay has the lever Rams in fact, if it goes away, a TV channel will probably give a boost to what it is already doing. And if you want to get a Ryan Day or a Lincoln Riley out of college, you’re going to have to get past the eight-digit numbers that these guys are going down (Look what Carolina did to attract Matt Rhule). Baylor).

Now, what I’m so sure about is how far the market correction has gone: owners have decided in the past to continue to handle numbers, and for the first time coaches are rarely in a position to say no, even if the offers are below market. But what if some big names make deals, or even shed a little of their weight? It could happen soon.

• So what’s the big difference between Kyler Murray and Lamar Jackson (who chose not to lose a veteran minicamp) and DK Metcalf and Terry McLaurin (who decided to stay in Basque)? Not just Murray and Jackson, as former first-team players, earning more money (which should give them more financial flexibility to sustain)? These two are quarters, and the other two are not.

And that means Murray and Jackson’s decision to hold on affects everyone in the attack, and that would damage the quality of the work the team can do this week. That doesn’t mean Metcalf and McLaurin aren’t important to their teams. They are. But it’s much easier to believe you’re ready to install a receiver than to simulate your thread player directing the show.

So for now, I wouldn’t take the actions of those four this week, which means that one player is more serious than the next guy to pay for.

• Speaking of Metcalf, at least that’s interesting, per Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll, Geno Smith looks set to get the first picture of training. The Seahawks, and the league, know who Smith is as a player. He is 31 years old. This will be his ninth season and his fourth in Seattle. If there had been a revelation from Smith, it would have happened by now. And this highlights the fact that Drew Lock has not yet passed.

Now Seattle has surely given priority to getting Lockell in Russell Wilson’s trade: John Schneider loved Lock to get Lock out of Missouri in 2019, and Lock’s best tape came from the end of his new year, when he was directing one. The attack is very similar to what Shane Waldron does for Carroll. That said, the Seahawks have never been ashamed to let a young boy with flashes compete to play time. In fact, in 2012 it was a beginner’s mini-camp for the team to get Wilson’s initial representatives.

So it will be interesting to see if things like this during the spring will tempt Carroll or Schneider to take a second look at Baker Mayfield or Jimmy Garoppolo this summer.

• It will be more difficult to do such a reading Panthers they will be leaving their mini-camp this week, although Sam Darnold has been out for a year, and both he and Matt Corral have started with coordinator Ben McAdoo again. However, at least from the inside, Caroline will have a better idea of where they are after this week, with the intention of reuniting from there, to mark the quarterback’s career — whether the photos include Mayfield or Garoppolo.

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• One of the highlights of last week’s conversation with Matt Ryan — I asked him, in his in-depth tape review over the past three months, what he saw of the Colts when he saw and met his new band. He laughed because he thought his answer was obvious.

“Running game,” he said. And he confirmed that he had seen some well-known things inside him, for five coordinators and twice for Dirk Koetter, more than 14 years in Atlanta.

“The running game is a little different from what I did with Kyle Shanahan,” he said. “But sometimes we rolled the ball with Mike Mularkey early in my career, or Dirk Koetter’s first time, where there were similar schemes. It’s all the things I’ve done, how they train and how they emphasize things that are a little different. “

That being said, one thing is for Ryan he does You know what a great running game can do for him, Michael Turner has helped ease the transition to the league early in his career, and in 2016 he praised Shanahan’s running game in the Super Bowl.

“Definitely,” Ryan said. “I’m just like me. Okay, let’s go. Obviously, you still have to go there and do it, you don’t get out of bed and run the ball the way they did. You have to win, you have to work. But the potential is there. And the proof of the video is there. That’s part of it, I know it’s about having a whole football team. And the balance for me is to be able to run the ball when you want to run the ball, and to throw the ball when you want to throw the ball, not to do it about numbers, and then to make a good defense.

“And all of these things move me with this organization. I’m on fire to be here. “

Kareem Elgazzar / USA Today Network

• Jerick McKinnon is a better story than you think. He became a college quarterback who became a professional player in Minnesota, played well to earn free pay in San Francisco, then broke the ACL for a year in a row, lost every 2018 and 19 game, and returned to a place with the Chiefs.

McKinnon is not a superstar, and he never was. But last year he had to make his way back to Kansas City on special teams, eventually getting touched on offense, and then became a significant piece of the Chiefs in the playoffs. It’s still fun to watch, and it will be interesting to see what Andy Reid does with it once he knows how to expand it in 2021.

However, how it plays out is good to see McKinnon again.

• I picked up a new nugget from last week’s mini-camps Vikings Coach Kevin O’Connell and GM coach Kwesi Adofo-Mensah were impressed with the depth of the team’s various positions. One is the tailback, where managers believe they’ve got a couple of real talents beyond the columns of Dalvin Cook and Alexander Mattison. (I’ve heard that Kene Nwangwu is a two-year speed forward and Ty Chandler is a fifth-round pick).

This, of course, speaks volumes about the work the old regime did to build the list. And in recent weeks it seemed like a lot to build on what the new Raiders guys had inherited from Vegas in recent weeks, the same goes for O’Connell and Adofo-Mensah in Twin Cities.

• So there is a money dispute over ownership of the Chargers? It would be very surprising if it happened at the NFL level.

• He is delighted to see Trey Lance get some extra work, and it would be hopeful that he could make the same leap as he did when he gave the team a 40-day summer break last spring between summer camps and training. He works in Atlanta, North Dakota and Orange County to try to accelerate his development.

Work ethic, mindset and character were certainly never a problem with Lance. We’ll see if, in the summer, the Niners are looking for a more natural shooter than they saw last year.

• My answers Tweet about Derrick Mason they were interesting on Monday — some couldn’t believe he would be considered a better recipient than AJ Brown. And I think I’d get out of the argument by saying that even though Brown has a lot of potential, he has a way of making the career that Mason had.

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