In June, Lions president Rod Wood told ESPN, “It’s going to be whatever
it takes, I think, to make it happen from both sides. And whether he
becomes the highest-paid or not, it’ll be a short-lived designation
because, as [GM Bob Quinn] said, and I think it’s true, if you’re the
top whatever of quarterbacks, when your time comes up, your time comes
up, and then somebody else’s time comes up, and they become the highest
[paid].” Take those comments, and fast-forward a month, and the easy
thing to do is point to Carr’s $25 million-per-year megadeal as the
standard bearer. The problem with that? Stafford’s franchise tag number
for 2017 is $26.4 million, which means the total to tag him twice would
by $58.08 million and makes it reasonable for him to ask for a deal
closer to $30 million per. Will he? He could, and change the price tag
for quarterbacks that way. Or he could compromise and set precedents
that would help players in other ways going forward. This, in fact, is
how the paradigm on guaranteed contracts could change (more on that
later): A player like Stafford says, O.K., since you don’t want to go
to that number, how about guaranteeing my money into the fourth year of
that deal, or just fully guaranteeing a shorter deal so I get another
shot at this in my 30s? The bottom line is that the leverage
Stafford has to ask for a bigger chunk of his team’s cap than others can
give him a powerful bargaining chip. It’ll be interesting to see how he
uses it.