Paying Purdy

 

By Scooter_McG

The 49ers will have a number of areas to address this offseason, but none more pressing or important than sorting out what to do with Brock Purdy. While Purdy has played at an exceptionally high level to start his career – by almost any metric his stats over the first three years of his career are as good and better than anyone not named Mahomes – there is no denying the level of his play faltered in 2024 as the supporting cast was not as strong around him. The idea of paying him at or above current top of the QB market no longer seems reasonable in the eyes of most parties, despite many predicting that would be the case heading into the 2024 season.

I have been playing around with some potential extension contract amounts and structures to see to help my own understanding of the potential ramifications on the 49ers salary cap. And what surprised me during this exercise was that it’s possible to hand out a pretty big contract without completely ruining the 49ers cap situation.

I asked in the previous post what people would be willing to pay Purdy as a share of the 49ers cap, and Razor was kind enough to reply with 12%. This was along the lines of what I was thinking as well, at 12.5%. Doing a little bit of research, this seems to be in the ball park of what Super Bowl winning QBs not on rookie contracts have comprised of the cap in the past.

To understand what this means in terms of dollars it is necessary to project the salary cap forward over the likely life of Purdy’s deal. Current projections to 2027 (https://overthecap.com/nfl-and-nflpa-look-forward-to-the-future-salary-cap#google_vignette) indicate around $272.2M in 2025, $298.2M in 2026 and $328.2M in 2027. I have assumed the cap then continues to increase by $30M per annum thereafter.

For the purposes of this exercise I am assuming the team decides to give Brock a five year extension (i.e., he would be under contract for the next six seasons, adding five years to his remaining one year on his rookie deal). The money he is given would also be additional to the existing $1.1M he is already scheduled to make for 2025 on his rookie deal, while also having $19,200 in pro-rated signing bonus due next against the 2025 cap that will also remain.  

Over the next six years, based on my cap projections this would sum to $2,063.2M in total cap per team – 12% of this would equate to around $247.5M while 12.5% would be around $258M. This sets a ballpark for what our extension amount should be if we want to achieve 12% to 12.5% of the salary cap. However, it is also important to remember we can use void years to pro-rate option bonuses to push some cap hits into future years beyond the six years of the deal, and thereby add additional money to the deal while still aiming to hit our goal of 12% to 12.5%. For this exercise I have decided to look at a 5-year extension paying Purdy an additional $280M (i.e., under contract for 6 years to 2030, paying $281.1M over those 6 years). I’m also going to add two void years at the end of the deal.

For the new money, I’ve decided to go with the following bonus structure, while paying $100M in new salary over the life of the deal.

Below is a summary of the yearly cash, cap hits and percent of total salary cap by year based on this structure.

Of note, I have decided in this example to keep his cap hit below 12% for the first four years, then letting it increase to just under 15% in years 5 and 6. By year 5 the team will know whether they want to keep committing to Purdy and would likely restructure/ extend his deal or let him go at this point.

This is just one potential structure and there are many ways they could go about this. The main thing this highlighted to me was that it’s possible to give Purdy a big deal (above the likes of Tua, Love and Lawrence) while still keeping it at a level that shouldn’t preclude the team from maintaining a strong roster around him.

The only caveat with the above though is that you have to commit to Purdy for at least another 3 years, and likely 4 – anything less and the dead cap hit will likely be too onerous to get out from.