Eagles can win with an expensive Jalen Hurts, but free-agent frustration is their new norm

With Hurts about to get expensive, the Eagles had to let Javon Hargrave and other free agents walk. The draft is the solution for their QB's looming contract.

Jalen Hurts is in line to get much more expensive for the Eagles.Read moreYong Kim / Staff Photographer

by David Murphy | Columnist

Published March 14, 2023, 1:00 p.m. ET

There’s a weaselly stat people like to cite that says a team has never won a Super Bowl with a quarterback making X percent of the salary cap, where X is the current market rate for a franchise player. It’s weaselly on a few levels.

One, X is usually sufficiently high enough to exclude several players whose current contracts were market rate when they signed. Two, exactly 12 quarterbacks have won Super Bowls over the last 22 years, which is a comically small sample size even before you consider that five quarterbacks are responsible for 15 of those wins. Three, Patrick Mahomes won this year’s Super Bowl while carrying the NFL’s biggest cap hit, so The Stat isn’t even true anymore. At least, not if it’s framed with any sort of intellectual honesty.

All that being said, the biggest issue with The Stat, however it is framed, is that it does not lead to any actionable conclusion. There might be some doubt about whether a team can win with a quarterback above a certain salary threshold. But there’s no doubt that a team can’t win with a quarterback below a certain talent threshold. In most cases, the option is one or the other. In which case, what exactly are we arguing?

All of this is to say that what the Eagles are experiencing early in this offseason is one of those unfortunate facts of life for which there is no real solution, like rush-hour traffic or lower-back pain or the NyQuil Chicken Challenge. Their fiscal reality is clear. We are living in a world where Daniel Jones just signed a contract that includes a $45 million cap hit in 2024. Derek Carr will make $35.6 million that season, Geno Smith at a few million less. Those were the best fallback options. After that, it might have been Baker Mayfield. The only question with Jalen Hurts is the multiples of pain.

The Eagles still have a window of at least one or two years of paying Hurts his due without too much collateral damage. Deshaun Watson’s unprecedentedly lucrative contract will end up costing the Browns just $28.5 million in cap space over its first two years. Don’t be surprised if the Eagles end up flashing some cash on one- or two-year deals for free agents. They might have been able to fit Javon Hargrave’s $6.7 million cap hit alongside Hurts’ eventual number for 2023. But his new deal with the Niners will cost $18-plus million in Year 3. They simply can’t match that.

The Hargrave deal is a good example of the fallacious notion of saving money at quarterback. Sure, the Eagles would be a drastically better team with Hurts and a high-paid disruptor at defensive tackle. But would they be a better team with Carr and Hargrave versus Hurts and the latter’s replacement? If you feel the need to think, please stop.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty of truth in the notion that it is easier to build a team around a cheap quarterback versus an expensive one. It is an incontrovertible law of budgetary science that the more money you pay one person out of a limited pool, the less you can pay everyone else. Even Howie Roseman can’t find a way around that one. The problem is that even the least of the competent quarterbacks is probably worth the money.

Call it the Joe Flacco Paradox.

Were the Baltimore Ravens a drastically better team when they won the Super Bowl in 2012 with a quarterback making 6% of the cap and four future Hall of Famers making 33%? Sure. Was their ability to win compromised by their inability to re-sign or replace Ed Reed and Anquan Boldin plus starters Michael Oher, Cary Williams and Corey Graham? No doubt. Could the Ravens have surrounded Flacco with the talent he needed to go better than 42-41 over the next six seasons if his cap hit hadn’t nearly doubled to 11% in 2014 en route to becoming the highest-paid quarterback in the league in 2017? Probably. Could they have built a winning team around Tyrod Taylor with any amount of money? History suggests otherwise.

In fairness, Taylor’s subsequent 22-20 stint as Bills starter suggests that it might have been a draw. But that’s it, despite the fact that Flacco was one of the lesser talents in his pay grade and Taylor was one of the best. And, it’s worth noting, Taylor himself was the third-highest-paid player on the team in his last year with the Bills.

While Hurts is clearly in a different class from Flacco, there’s some reason to wonder if he’s that rare player who can overcome the wrong mix of talent around him. How good would he be without Jason Kelce and Lane Johnson? Is it good enough to overcome a defense without Hargrave and Darius Slay? A DeVonta Smith contract extension is a couple of years away.

The best answer is to draft well. Roseman’s first act ended in a broom closet. His second act ended with two Super Bowls. His third act will involve building a team the old-fashioned way: identifying and drafting cost-controlled amateur talent. He followed the 2017 Super Bowl with a draft that helped lead to 2022: Dallas Goedert in the second, Avonte Maddox and Josh Sweat in the fourth, Jordan Mailata in the seventh. Since then, it’s been boom (Hurts, Smith, Landon Dickerson) or bust (Jalen Reagor, Andre Dillard, JJ Arcega-Whiteside).

If there was a formula for success, you might define it like this: Average one immediate contributor/starter, one future starter, and one future Pro Bowler per season. If the immediate contributor is a starter and future Pro Bowler, that counts too. That amounts to 12 homegrown starters over a four-year cycle. Retain half from the previous cycle, and you have four spots to fill. That’s a lofty goal. But it’s some approximation of where the Eagles are. Of course, the better the quarterback, the easier it is to give him the talent he needs.

Which brings us back to The Stat we mentioned at the jump. The history actually says an elite, high-paid quarterback is one of the only ways to consistently compete for a title. Peyton Manning may have “only” been the NFL’s sixth-highest-paid quarterback when he won a Super Bowl with the Denver Broncos in 2015, but when he initially signed, his Year 1 cap number was tops in the league at 14.9%. In 2009, he was at 18.8% when he won with the Indianapolis Colts. That’s the equivalent of $42.3 million in 2023.

You want a stat? Over the last two decades, every Super Bowl-winning quarterback except one was the league’s first- or second-highest-paid player at least once in their careers. The exception was Nick Foles. And teams have already tried that.