It’s a slow time in the calendar, but we’ll have some news coming this week from Minneapolis, which is where I’m headed now. Until then, here are this week’s takeaways …
Brock Purdy and the San Francisco 49ers did a deal that’s fair to everyone. No, it’s not the deal Dak Prescott, who was wielding a historic level of leverage, did last August. Nor is it one that’ll be the marker for younger guys such as C.J. Stroud and Jayden Daniels who will come up for rich new contracts over the next few years.
But the timing of it tells you what you need to know.
Going into the 2024 season, and coming off Super Bowl LXIII, agent Kyle Strongin asked Purdy if he wanted to discuss his priorities for the life-changing second contract he’d be eligible for in 2025. The 49ers quarterback said he’d rather lock in on football and cross that bridge after the year.
Things didn’t exactly go to plan thereafter. While the Niners finished fourth in total offense and Purdy was seventh in QBR, the team collapsed under a rash of injuries and finished the second half of the season 2–6. A cap purge followed. But the team’s plan at quarterback didn’t relent.
Strongin told Purdy before the combine to be prepared to get a deal done on the first day of training camp. Part of that is just how these things go, and part was probably what the Niners went through the past few summers with Deebo Samuel, Nick Bosa and Brandon Aiyuk. GM John Lynch said early on he wanted to avoid that with Purdy, after the sides had their initial meeting in February, that seemed to be the course set.
Yet, here we are now, with a deal, two months ahead of schedule.
That isn’t to say this all happened in a straight line. The Niners made the first move, asking Purdy’s side to make the trip to Santa Clara for an initial negotiating session. The second meeting happened over dinner at the combine at Indianapolis’s iconic St. Elmo Steak House, where a few things were established.
In the first meeting, the Niners got their point across that they weren’t going to break records with the contract. At the second meeting, in Indy, it was established that Purdy’s side wasn’t going to do a deal that didn’t have strong cashflow, structure and guarantees, things that would affirm that he was San Francisco’s guy for the foreseeable future.
The result? There was a lot of work to do.
The following breaking point came with the start of the offseason program. The Niners have been through the game of players in contract disputes skipping the spring before. In this case, with it being a quarterback, and to avoid that, that particular checkpoint in the calendar pushed movement, with Strongin and San Francisco cap chiefs Paraag Marathe and Brian Hampton, who actually worked together in 2008 and ’09 when Strongin was a scouting assistant, finding compromises.
As such, Purdy, who didn’t want things to get ugly, reported for the offseason program. That brought the unspoken acknowledgement that talks had gotten serious, with Hampton and Strongin working together to get there, and there was a deal to be executed.
At the end of last week, Strongin called Hampton looking for one last concession, promising a deal if Purdy got it. Hampton called Marathe, GM John Lynch and coach Kyle Shanahan, who were on a golf trip, and the five-year, $265 million deal was pushed over the goal line. The deal didn’t break records on the Niners’ side of the line. On Purdy’s side, it did, more or less, commit the Niners to the foreseeable future.
Some key points:
• The contract has $165.05 million in new money over the first three new years, which edged out a metric Jared Goff’s deal in Detroit hit last year. That means he’ll get $170.14 million over the first four years of the contract (2025 to ’28). Goff’s deal was an important comparison because both sides saw it as one that didn’t break records, but did well by the player in many different ways.
• He gets $215 million in new money over the first four new years, which means he’ll make $220.3 million over the first five years of the contract.
• That leaves $50 million in 2030, the final year of the six-year, $270.346 million contract, which essentially tells you this isn’t a heavily back-loaded deal with a bloated number at the end to make it look prettier—something Purdy’s camp wanted to avoid. By comparison, he’ll make $55.05 million in ’28 and $49.95 million in ’29.
• Purdy gets 62% of his money in the first three years, which tops the cashflow in most of the richer quarterback contracts done.
• The $181 million injury guarantee that was floated out there is important, but the more relevant number is $176 million, the amount that’s either fully guaranteed at signing, or vests as fully guaranteed a year ahead of time (which essentially would deliver a heavy, heavy financial penalty to the team for walking away early).
• Purdy also got a no-trade clause, which was off the table initially, and a first for the Niners.
So, now, the Niners and Purdy move forward. OTAs kick off a week from Monday, and no one has to worry about whether the quarterback will be there or where he is in his negotiation, a good place for everyone to be.
Tom Brady’s involvement in Las Vegas is interesting, and shows how tactful he’s being. New Las Vegas Raiders coach Pete Carroll acknowledged this in comments he made last week to Mike Salk and Brock Huard on Seattle radio.
“We’re phone buddies,” Carroll said. “He hasn’t been out here but one time since we’ve been here, but we’ve talked a ton of times, and talking philosophy with Tom, you can imagine what a thrill it is, because he’s the all-time competitor. It’s not just how he played, it’s how he lived, and how he sees the world, and how he attacks every opportunity he has. We’re so eye to eye on that, it’s been a blast. It’s really been fun.
“The challenge of it is to bring that mentality and connect it to our entire franchise.”
All right, so the first question a lot of people would have is why Brady, with his endless resources, wouldn’t be around more.
The one time he came through was ahead of the acquisition of Geno Smith in March, where his input was valuable for obvious reasons. Like Carroll said, other than that, Brady has been working “remote” as a minority owner of the Raiders, and that’s been intentional.
As I understand it, Brady’s cognizant of how his mere presence can take the oxygen out of whatever room he’s in. So to empower Carroll and GM John Spytek, who Brady was with in Tampa, he’s tried to make himself physically scarce, staying back in South Florida where he and two of his three children reside.
That said, he has made an impact in a couple of different ways.
Brady promised to coaching candidates in January that with the presence of his fellow new limited partners, who he helped bring in, would materially change how the traditionally cash-poor Raiders would operate. With Brady’s business partner Tom Wagner, Silver Lake CEO (and Manchester City board member) Egon Durban and Discovery Land founder Michael Meldman in the fold, the Raiders have delivered on that, maybe most notably in paying $6 million per year to pry offensive coordinator Chip Kelly from Ohio State.
Then, there’s what Carroll referenced in setting an organizational identity. It’s well-established that Brady’s priority would be bringing in players of high football character, who have the kind of competitive edge and work ethic that Brady did. That meshes with Carroll and Spyek’s beliefs, which helps color the decisions to hire them, and it was all over the Raiders’ draft class.
So, no, Brady’s not there every day. But, intrinsically, his presence is.
I don’t mind keeping playoff seeding the way it is. On the NFL’s agenda for this week’s league meeting in Eagan, Minn., is Detroit’s proposal for seeding the playoffs based solely on record—the four division champions in each conference would still make the playoffs, but they wouldn’t be guaranteed a top-four seed and home game, as they have been since the NFL re-aligned to eight divisions when it expanded to Houston in 2002.
The Lions’ proposal was up for a vote in March, too, but commissioner Roger Goodell tabled it to this week after an informal vote showed that only a handful of teams supported it, a clear sign that he, and by extension the league office, wanted to try and turn the room. The NFL’s stance was that, for reasons we detailed Friday, changing the seeding format would mean more teams playing for something in Weeks 17 and 18. In turn, it would create more compelling games for broadcast partners.
I get the idea, for sure. I just don’t support it.
Why? Because of the way the NFL’s scheduling formula works. The reality is, this is a 32-team league where each one plays 14 opponents (with two games against each of your division opponents), 10 in-conference. Because of that, there are massive scheduling inequities. At this point in the calendar, those are hard to forecast. But we can give you an example based on what we do know.
The NFC East, in the scheduling formula, drew the NFC North and AFC West this year, and those two divisions had six playoff teams last year. The NFC West drew the two South divisions, which only qualified their champions for the playoffs, had six teams with losing records, and four with 12 or more losses.
Now, let’s assume the strengths and weaknesses of those divisions hold. Let’s also say the Philadelphia Eagles win their division at 10–7, having fought through that slog, while San Francisco finished second in its division at 12–5, largely because of its slate. The two teams have four common opponents this year, so their records won’t be close to apples-to-apples. So, in this case, by giving the Niners the higher seed, you’d be at least partly rewarding a lighter lift.
One executive I talked to did say some ideas were raised during the league’s March meeting. One was to require a team have a winning record to guarantee a home playoff game. Another was to create a provision where a division champion couldn’t be a certain number of games worse than the wild cards and still host a game.
So we’ll see if this passes this week. I would guess that the league doesn’t have the support—they were so far from the 24 votes needed to pass it in March—and Goodell kicks this idea to 2026, probably without even taking a vote.
But I do think, in time, we see something happen on this front, which honestly, I don’t think is necessary.
The push-play proposal needs fine-tuning. The language distributed to teams this week was unchanged from March, saying an offensive player can’t “immediately at the snap, push or throw his body against a teammate, who was lined up directly behind the snapper and received the snap, to aid him in an attempt to gain yardage.” That, I know, is going to be a problem for a lot of teams among the 16 or so that voted against a proposed ban in March.
The sense I get is a lot of folks want it simplified.
“I’m curious to see if they change [the proposal] next week; I assume they will,” says one AFC exec. “The point was made, and I totally agree with it, and it’s the reason so many people were against it and wanted it rewritten—it’s too inconsistent and spotty, and it feels like we’re cherry-picking. Let’s write it so we’re not just banning one play.”
I have to assume that when this discussion starts—it’s scheduled for Wednesday—the competition committee, and in particular chairman Rich McKay, will have some potential changes to the wording ready to go.
What McKay, the Atlanta Falcons CEO, raised to those in the room in March was going back to what the “player-assist” rule was in 2004, where pushing or pulling a teammate was banned, with provisions put in to help the officials downfield (the gray area of blocking vs. pushing downfield was why it was removed in early ’05). Another idea that was floated at the meetings, and I kind of like this one (if the rule is going to be changed), would be to have officials simply whistle plays dead when an offensive player pushes a teammate, similar to the forward progress rules.
It does seem clear that the NFL is determined to get the rule changed, which is another reason I think McKay, the competition committee and the league itself, will be flexible to ideas on shaping an adjusted or new proposal that has a better shot at passing.
My guess here would be that we do leave Minnesota on Wednesday with some sort of ban in place.
The Olympic debate will be interesting this week. If you missed the NFL’s aggressive public-relations push last week, owners will consider a proposal to allow for one player per team to play in the 2028 Olympic flag-football competition.
That the league office is pushing this should come as no surprise. How the individual owners react to the initiative behind closed doors in Minneapolis will be more interesting.
The NFL was instrumental in pushing the IOC to add flag football to the Los Angeles games, and it’s not out of the goodness of their hearts. For the NFL, this is about finding a way to continue growing the game outside of its normal bounds. That means using it to engage women, and using it to engage audiences outside of the United States.
The root of this goes back to the constraints of the sport itself. Tackle football will almost certainly never be a game played by many young girls and women. It’s also incredibly difficult to export, given the number of people it takes to play, and the cost of equipment and insurance and everything else. It’s not like basketball or soccer, where you can drop off a bag of balls and a couple goals or hoops and get kids playing.
Along those lines, there are limits to how much a sport’s popularity can grow within a specific audience if very few people in that audience have played. So with all of the difficulties in trying to break through that invisible wall with tackle football, the NFL’s belief has been it can work around it with flag, which requires less people, equipment and infrastructure.
That’s why the NFL has pushed hard to try to get individual states to sanction flag as a girls varsity sport. It’s why the NFL has been trying to get the Olympics on board, which, the league believes, will get more kids playing in foreign countries.
Will it work? I’m skeptical. I’ve never sat down to watch a flag football game—and I’ve loved football for as long as I can remember, and consume college and high school football, on top of everything I do with the NFL for my job. So if I’m not watching it, I have hard time believing a young girl will choose to watch it over basketball or gymnastics in the Olympics, or that someone overseas will suddenly think they need to go out and start playing it.
But, sure, if A.J. Brown or Jaylen Waddle are playing in 2028, I’d be more likely to watch. Would I keep watching in July if it weren’t part of my job? Maybe, maybe not.
The NFL’s bet here is that people will be pulled in and that flag will become a more mainstream sport both here and abroad. Whether the league making that bet is worth a team putting a star player out there for a month before training camp, knowing it could affect their season (either by injury, or even just altering their pre-camp training routine) is an open question.
I’m sure different owners will have different viewpoints on it.
The New York Jets were angry about their schedule last year, felt like they paid a price, and it looks like the NFL schedule makers heard them. Prior to 2024, the NFL, as a rule, shied away from scheduling teams for three games in 10-day stretches. That wall came crumbling down last fall with 10 of the league’s 32 teams put on such runs.
Robert Saleh & Co. arguably got the short end of that stick. They had to go cross country to San Francisco to play the Niners in the Monday night opener, then had a trip to Tennessee with their home opener coming the following Thursday against the Patriots. The Jets managed to go 2–1, but the scars, per those there, lasted. New York went 1–9 in the 10 games to follow, and wound up firing Saleh and GM Joe Douglas separately over that time.
The Seattle Seahawks, New Orleans Saints, Dallas Cowboys, Cincinnati Bengals and Chicago Bears also had Monday/Sunday/Thursday turns, and the Pittsburgh Steelers, Baltimore Ravens, Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans wound up in the Christmas “round-robin” that had those teams playing Sunday/Saturday/Wednesday.
So, to me, one of the biggest questions going into the schedule release was whether they would do that to anyone in 2025.
They did it to one team.
And that team has an owner who would never complain about his team playing on big stages. The Cowboys have a Monday/Sunday/Thursday turn ahead of Thanksgiving. But only the first of those games is away—a Monday nighter at Vegas—and there’s a bye week before that stretch.
I did ask NFL VP of broadcasting Onnie Bose about it. He conceded that it wasn’t a coincidence that there was less of this sort of game-crunching than before.
“There’s a general effort, if it’s not ideal, we don’t want to do it, kind of like a three-game road trip or certain other things we see, like a road game after a road Monday night game,” he told me last week. “We call these ’scheduling inequities’ that we keep track of, that we try to minimize. But they’re not off the table—you’ll never have a four-game road trip and you try not to have a three-game road trip. Yeah, this is one, by function last year with Christmas, it happened. It happened to the Jets.
“Now it happens to the Cowboys. Part of that for the Cowboys, I’m not implying this is the reason why, but they were going to be home on Thursday for Thanksgiving and the way the schedule fell out, with that Monday night game two weeks prior, it’s how it came through.”
In other words, yes, they heard the team last year. But when Christmas is on a Tuesday in 2029, well, someone is going to have to deal with that.
It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that this is the year the NFL is hitting pause on the Accelerator. The program, to try and create education and opportunity for diverse coaching and GM candidates, has been paused, with this week’s meetings normally being the setting for the coaching program. That it happened now, just a few weeks after Goodell did a photo op with president Donald Trump—the only photo he’s done with a sitting president that I could find from his 19 years as commissioner—creates an interesting optic.
For better or worse, Trump’s administration has dived into the sports world. There was plenty of speculation that his influence led to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred peeling back the ban of Pete Rose, which will allow for Rose to be voted on as a Hall of Fame candidate. Trump also attended the September Georgia-Alabama game during his campaign, and the Super Bowl shortly after his inauguration.
Under Trump, there has indeed been an effort to roll back COVID-19-era D.E.I. policies and initiatives, and the Accelerator certainly would fall into that category.
How would it benefit these leagues to play ball with the current administration? Well, with so many moving parts in how games will be broadcast in the coming years, their antitrust exemptions could come under scrutiny again and, from a business standpoint, because of that, it’d make sense for these leagues to have the president on their side.
So while the Accelerator definitely needed some work, which is the stated reason for the NFL hitting pause on it, I don’t know that pausing it was really necessary. Unless, that is, doing so helped the league in some other way.
I think it’s worth considering what Ryan Clark said about his former Steelers coach Mike Tomlin. In case you missed what he said on ESPN the other day, here it is …
“I believe Mike Tomlin should coach in another organization,” Clark said. “Mike Tomlin should be a fresh voice somewhere else. … As great as a coach as he is, and he’s a first-ballot Hall of Famer, I believe his voice has run stale there. I believe he’s allowed that team to reach the highest of heights they’re gonna reach, unless they can get a top-tier quarterback.”
Bill Walsh said that a coach’s voice could, indeed, lose its effect after that coach had been leading an organization for over a decade. However, Bill Belichick won Super Bowls in his 15th, 17th and 19th years in charge in New England, and Andy Reid won Super Bowls in his 10th and 11th years in charge in Kansas City, and made another Super Bowl last year, in Year 12.
The amount of player turnover in today’s NFL probably helps—your message won’t be as susceptible to growing stale if the players aren’t the same as they were, say, five years ago.
Still, at some point, a change of scenery is best for everyone. Reid and the Eagles would concede that they reached that point at the end of the 2012 season, the coach and his former team having combined for five Super Bowl titles since.
I don’t know if Tomlin and the Steelers are there yet. They certainly aren’t some sort of mess. But as Tomlin heads into his 18th season, it’s at least a discussion worth having.
The Saints’ quarterback competition will be interesting. It’s not, to be sure, what the Saints brass had planned for heading into the 2025 offseason. But as messy as things got with Derek Carr, it’s not like there was some gigantic missed opportunity that came and went as a result of New Orleans working through that with their veteran quarterback.
As for where they are now, I do get the sense that they feel like this is manageable for a couple reasons. All three of the guys in their competition entered the league with a high volume of college experience—Spencer Rattler started 42 games in college, Tyler Shough 32 and Jake Haener 29, while the three combined for 18 seasons on NCAA rosters. Generally, that sort of time on task does help a guy when he’s breaking in as an NFL starter.
Second, at least with Shough and Rattler, there was an RPO skill set apparent in college that should allow for Kellen Moore and staff to deploy some simpler concepts early on.
Third, they have talent on offense. With Kelvin Banks Jr. and Taliese Fuaga at the tackles, and Eric McCoy and Cesar Ruiz inside, the line should be a real strength. And after the Saints resisted trade overtures for Chris Olave (who’s had a very solid offseason) from Cleveland and Pittsburgh earlier in the year, the skill group comes back in good shape, if maybe in need of one more bigger body at receiver (Keenan Allen played for Moore in Los Angeles).
So, again, this whole thing hasn’t been ideal, but Moore does have a few things to work with here as he goes about building his first offense in New Orleans.
We have some quick-hitters for you here in mid-May …
• One thing I kind of buy on the Aaron Rodgers/schedule release theory—last year’s Jets schedule left a mark. Outside of the Dublin game, which was already baked in, Pittsburgh plays two “off” games, and they’re spread out, with a Thursday nighter in Week 7 and Monday nighter in Week 15. So if that was the strategy, I guess it worked.
• A question I’ve been asked a lot about is teams selling off shares. Sometimes, as we mentioned with the Raiders, a benefit is having added capital and deeper-pocketed investors to pour back in the team. But more often, the long-range idea is for families to prepare for estate-tax hits. As valuations of teams escalate, those bills will only going to go up, and more planning is needed for them.
• The Ravens’ deal with Derrick Henry is good for everyone involved. Yes, it’s unprecedented for a 30-year-old running back. However, in the grand scheme of things, they’re paying $14 million this year, $11 million next year and have a $12 million option for 2027. So he gets $18 million in new money over the $7 million he was slated to make this year, and over the next two years. If he breaks down? The cost will be what it costs for a slot receiver in ’25.
• I’d assume the Dallas-rooted Hunt family was fine with the Chiefs spending Thanksgiving with the Cowboys. I’d guess they’ll skip the team flight back to Kansas City.
• The Denver Broncos just poached New England Patriots college scouting director Cam Williams to be their new co-director of player personnel. And the former Ohio State linebacker is one to watch—with George Paton’s department in Denver getting raided, Williams (seen by many as a future GM) was a really good get to counteract all the attrition.
• It feels like things are leveling off a little for Belichick, who has found safe harbor in a slew of interviews, like the one he did with Michael Strahan on Good Morning America, where he’s managed to say very little. Which, I guess, means having some real public-relations people on hand has helped.
• I’ve written for a while that NFL people are hot on the idea of having a draft lottery. But I do wonder if the NBA moving theirs from a TV studio to a venue with a sizable audience got the attention of Park Avenue—and an office that tries to turn everything into an event.
• Everyone cool if we stop talking about Shedeur Sanders’s number for a while?
• In all seriousness, it does sound like Sanders, based on the interviews I’ve heard, is starting to settle in as a guy who knows he’ll have to earn just the chance to compete to get on the field in 2025.
• The Buffalo Bills being favored in all of their games is, of course, a product of the AFC East drawing the two South divisions in the scheduling formula. And it’s a cute fact for now. But if those divisions don’t get better? It could well be a factor in the Bills getting the No. 1 seed in the AFC playoffs for the first time in 32 years.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Takeaways: Inside Brock Purdy’s New Contract With the 49ers.