Former Green Bay Packers vice president Andrew Brandt doesn’t want to hear about salary-cap restrictions, particularly when discussing contracts awarded to top-tier quarterbacks.
“That’s the least important thing,” Brandt told Paul Dehner Jr. of The Athletic about cap hits. “That gets way too much play.”
Specifically, Brandt was referring to Cincinnati Bengals star quarterback Joe Burrow potentially taking less money than he’d earn on the open market so that the club can also pay talents such as wide receivers Tee Higgins and Ja’Marr Chase.
Brandt indicated there’s no reason a franchise can’t spread the wealth across multiple positions.
“It’s a copout for teams to say, ‘Hey, we can’t pay our best players because we are paying a quarterback a lot of money,'” Brandt explained. “It’s not true. It’s something that you have a $230 million cap and have half your team at least on (inexpensive) rookie contracts. This is not hard.”
“The salary cap isn’t real” has become a well-known meme around the NFL community largely because that figure seemingly can be easily manipulated even by so-called “cap-crunched” clubs. Brandt essentially echoed such takes.
“When I negotiated for the Packers years ago, I told the agents, I told the media, I told fans, let me worry about that,” Brandt said. “Let me worry about our cap. That’s not your problem. This idea of keeping the cap low or cap friendly, that’s all secondary to what is the deal, what is the cash, what is the contract.”
Burrow recently said he wants what is “best for myself and the team” regarding his second contract after Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens signed a five-year, $260M deal with $185M guaranteed earlier this offseason.
For what it’s worth, Pro Football Focus salary cap analyst Brad Spielberger suggested Burrow would have to give the Bengals a noteworthy discount for the franchise to lock him down and also hold onto Higgins and Chase.
“Yes, the cap is going to rise and all those things, sure, but if you are trying to maintain a good defense, which has certainly been very valuable to this team the last couple of years, it just gets really, really tough when you have that much money allocated to so few players,” Spielberger told Dehner.
