• The details of Matthew Stafford’s deal, agreed to months ago, have finally emerged, and the first line in any analysis starts here: .
The Los Angeles Rams’ bet in February and March, when they let Stafford sniff around for a trade and a new deal, was that their quarterback valued the life he’d built for his four kids in the area and the situation he had with Sean McVay. They were correct. His new deal gives him a nice bump over what he was making, for sure, and is the sort of contract adjustment teams only give to players they value at the highest level.
That said, the New York Giants and Las Vegas Raiders were willing to go a lot further, into the area where the average on a new contract would start with a five.
The Rams, in the end, gave him $80 million over the next two years, with $4 million already paid out in a March roster bonus that was, essentially, the last piece to the raise he got last year from the team before training camp. He has four $6 million option bonuses totaling $24 million (which allow the team flexibility cap-wise), and a $16 million base for this year, and an identical setup for next year. His 2025 money is fully guaranteed at signing. His ’26 money becomes fully guaranteed next March on the fifth day of the league year.
There are also eight void years on the back end of the deal, for cap purposes, which, like the option bonuses, give the Rams the ability to shape the deal to the cap however they see fit.
All right, so there are a couple of things from there to know about the contract.
First, it’s like Aaron Donald’s 2022 contract in that it’s the rare deal that’s a raise given to a player without adding years to the deal—usually the trade-off for a raise for a player with multiple years left on his deal is the team getting additional seasons of control. That’s not happening with Stafford. In Donald’s case, there were three years left on his contract. He was to make $55 million on the existing contract. The revision bumped that to $95 million. In this case, Stafford had $54 million left on his deal ($58 million if you include the roster bonus). Now, that number is $80 million ($84 million if you include the roster bonus).
So that’s a healthy $26 million raise. He had $23 million left this year, all in base salary, and was set to make $31 million next year, with a $5 million roster bonus fronting a $26 million base. That’s a $17 million jump this year, and a $9 million jump next year.
O.K., with that established, it’s still significantly less than he could’ve made. With the Raiders and Giants willing to exceed $100 million over the next two years, he walked away from around $20 million stay in California. You can say, But $20 million is $20 million. And so that makes this a little like the final deals that Peyton Manning, Drew Brees and Tom Brady signed—where those guys took a little less to stay put.
And in the final analysis, it’s another example of why NFL contracts should really only be valued through their guaranteed years. Stafford was past the guaranteed portion of his contract when he pushed for a raise last year. At signing, after the Rams won Super Bowl LVI, that deal was billed as a four-year, $160 million extension, worth $183 million over its five years. After all these machinations, if Stafford plays the next two years, he’ll wind up having made $209.015 million from 2022 to ’26.
That means the extension was actually $186.015 million over four years.
Which, to me, is well justified, because if Stafford hadn’t played up to his standard the past couple of years, then this would’ve gone the other way—and he wouldn’t make the money that isn’t guaranteed on his contract.
