5.79 million GUARANTEED per year, for a QB who hasn’t played a single snap in the league. and he wasn’t even the first pick. this is also the first time i remember a lower pick getting a higher contract than the no. 1 overall pick. usually teams use what the no. 1 guy got to slot no. 2, then no. 3 and so on…......this will really mess up Parcells (supposed) intended plan to help move rookie salaries down by getting Jake Long to a cheaper deal this year (J. Long’s deal was smaller than previous no. 1’s—first time it decreased in years).

is a sign of how ridiculous rookie contracts are. here you have a guy guaranteed more money than Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and Ben Roethlisberger. who if you haven’t noticed, have won some Super Bowls in the past few years. I can’t even explain how shocked/appalled I am. I’m gonna hop on the Atlanta fan page and see if there fans are excited, because they shouldn’t be!

Just silly… I can not freakin’ believe that.

i forgot that Arthur Blank (Falcons owner) has a crystal ball when it comes to signing QBs to big deals. Mike Vick led the Falcons thru their most gloriest days and…...oh, wait, nevermind.

this is ridiculous. any of you guys good with video editing? i’m 100% confident if I mail a highlight package of me playing nerf football on the beach I can squeeze a few million out of the Falcons.

i agree this is a horrible deal, but i was also wondering if this is gonna screw up next year’s rookie contracts even more.

Brady and Roethlisberger both won Super Bowls while working on THEIR ENTRY LEVEL CONTRACTS, so did Eli Manning this past season. Brady may have won all 3 on his first contract, actually. Peyton Manning didn’t, but certainly made the Colts strong contenders while working on his first deal. Likewise for Carson Palmer. Ryan will be 29 years old when this deal expires, there have been a lot of Super Bowls won by under 30 year old QBs over the years. Probably more than have been won by 30 and older QBs.

The money being paid to the rooks is what the teams are willing to pay. If it wasn’t financially sound over the long term the teams would not pay the money. QBs are an exception, but many position players are at their best in their first five years in the league. Especially running backs. They should be allowed to leave college a year or so earlier than other position players. A lot of them leave their best games behind them by the time they turn pro.

problem with the NFL. Rookie contracts are joke and they are continuing to spiral out of control. The crazy thing, is that the agent that represented Ryan is the same guy that represented Long! How do you think that phone call will go? I would be royally pissed as the #1 overall pick if my agent got a guy below me more money.

It also makes absolutely no sense from a business perspective. You name one Fortune 500 company that would hire a kid right out of college at a CEO pricetag. I’m glad that the owners did opt out of their contract…

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3404596

In that article, you can see that they specifically mention rookies as one of the three main points. What I don’t understand is how the Player’s Union would not be behind this as well. You would think that the majority of veterans would see moves like this and just scratch their heads.

Other major sports have rookie caps, most prominently the NBA, why can’t football?

Robert – I am not sure how you can say that this holds no logic. Again, prove to me how paying a guy out of college top dollar(and by top dollar, I mean higher than hugely successful long term vets) makes any sense. Just because Ben and the Manning twins have panned out does not mean that their deals were justified. The fact is that there are way more highly drafted QBs that just don’t pan out, than ones that do.

Since 1998 – the year of the Manning, there have been a total of 28 QBs drafted in the first round. Those that have won a superbowl are Peyton(1st overall), Ben(11th), Eli(1st)and oh, that’s it. The list of QBs that are starting: Rivers(4th), VY(3rd), Cutler(11th), Losman(22nd), Palmer(1st), Grossman(22nd), Pennington(18th), McNabb(2nd), Leinart(10th) and Campbell(25th). Thats it. Pennington and Leinart have not been great, just good. Grossman is terrible, and Losman and Cutler show promise. Vince Young… eh.

The failures – Leftwich(7th), Boller(19th), Carr(1st), Harrington(3rd), Ramsey(32nd), Vick(1st), Akili Smith(3rd), Couch(1st), Culpepper(11th), McNown(12th), Leaf(2nd), and Alex Smith(1st). Russell(1st), Quinn(22nd), and Rodgers(24th) are still untested.

That’s just the QBs. That is a 42% failure rate in 10 years. Less than 10% have won the Superbowl. Only 46% are current starters – and its dicey to say that Pennington and Grossman will continue to start. How can you say these numbers are logical???

picture was priceless! Love it.

First of all, as someone mentioned, Ryan goes into the season pretty much gauranteed to be the team’s starting QB. So he is in the same position as Brady, Roethlisberger, Manning, etc. The most important player for his team. He won’t be as good as any of them off the top, but the assumption is that over the next 6 years he will contribute in a similar fashion. It isn’t out of the question that 5 years down the road Matt Ryan may be the top QB in the league, Tom Brady is hanging on at the tail end of his career, Carson Palmer is retired due to chronic knee injuries, and Ben Roethisberger spends as much time on the disabled list as on the field.

Secondly, football players signing rookie contracts are also being paid for their college careers in a defacto sense. As they should be. Matt Ryan is being paid for all he learned and how he grew and developed since he first set foot on the BC campus in addition to what he will do as a member of the Atlanta Falcons. Pro football is bizarrely unique in it’s requirement that they will not hire an athlete who is not 3 full years removed from high school, and only then in exceptional cases. LeBron James and Sidney Crosby have been the two best players in their respective sport over the past couple of years. They have dominated their sport and earned countless millions of dollars already. If they were 20 year old football players they would be living in dormitories, lining up to eat at the cafeteria, and worrying about whether or not to accept a discount Ipod from a local merchant.

Other sports are even more extreme. There was a story in the local paper recently about a 9 year old 4th grader who was moving from Canada to play soccer in Spain for the Barcelona youth squad. All expenses paid for he and his family. Probably including an Ipod for the kid..:). Michelle Wei was a millionaire athlete before she reached high school, and the same for many tennis phenoms. The very best football athletes are still riding the subway and scalping college football tickets for spending money at the age of 22 or 23.

college athletes probably should be paid (and many are, under the table), but this is an NCAA problem, not the NFL’s

Also, Lebron’s rookie contract was like anyone else’s, not that big. He has made most of his money from Nike, etc.
Non-american football, aka soccer, employs tons of youths through various feeder leagues, some get paid a lot, others don’t.
Michelle Wie was in High school when she started making money, but she did NOT turn pro until she started doing well against good(professional) competition, and her money mostly comes from endorsements as well.

Poor student athletes are a creation of the NCAA.

...but I know that all hockey contracts are gauranteed for the length of the contract. Whatever Crosby signed for as a rookie he was going to take to the bank regardless of whether or not he ever played a game in the league. The cap for a three year entry level contract in the NHL is around $5 million now, I think. But I think that Crosby made close to $10 million his first year alone, with all of the bonus clauses included.

Why the Falcons will be a crappy team for the next decade.

$72 Million over 6 years for a QB who’s never played in an NFL Game. $35 million over 6 years for a running back who’s never been a regular starter (Michael Turner). That’s essentially one sixth of their salary cap for the next six years spent on two unproven players.

Let’s be realistic; they’re definitely going to continue sucking this year and they’ll end up with another really high draft pick. Can they really afford to sign ANOTHER top-five pick to a $50 million/6 year contract? Can they even afford to pay for the rest of their team? Or, more importantly, will they be able to afford to seriously rebuild their team in the next few years?

Could it be that they’re planning on a year with no salary cap and they’ll restructure the contract to pay out almost all of it then?

his arguments for the pros of this contract which somehow have devolved into hockey and paying college athletes. I’m done arguing about a mediocre centre for a middle of the pack NHL team. As for Turner, I can at least see going after him, since every time he touched the ball, he seemed to excel, and he has already played in the NFL for years. Just because he hasn’t started yet, doesn’t mean much to me. However, I do feel like they paid starter money for someone that wasn’t a starter, and I disagree with that, but this Ryan thing is a much bigger problem.

What I challenge Robert or any other person who, inexplicably, is for large rookie contracts is this: Prove how this is a sound financial choice. I have given stats that back up the idiocy of moves like this. Less than half of all 1st round QBs fail. Most of the folks had nothing but praise for Ryan Leaf when he was coming out. No one ever dreamed he would fail so spectacularly. But he did. The draft room floor is littered with such examples of QBs that were highly touted and failed badly.

Again, I will give you numbers. There have been 11 QBs drafted in the top 3 in the last ten years. Of those 11, only 5 start for their team – Vince Young, Eli, Peyton, Alex Smith and Palmer. Smith and VY are not anywhere close to being elite.

2 of those 11 are backups and definitely considered busts, Carr and Harrington.

4 are completely out of the league – Akili Smith, Couch, Leaf and of course Vick, who is sitting in jail.

Show me a business, any other business at all, that would look at a past history like this and think it a wise business investment. Even highly recruited law students don’t come into a firm making as much as a partner. So prove it. Don’t give me conjecture or your opinion. Don’t tell me maybes and probablys. Prove it. Fact is, you can’t. The NFL is unique in that they give untested, untried young men tens of millions of dollars on the chance that they will excel, when less than half of them ever do.

Oh, and to clear up one more point… Clarett was offered 430K by the Broncos. In true Clarett form he declined, and instead worked out and signed a deal that would have paid him 7million including incentives over 4 years. He of course, blew it. That’s 7 million, not 300K.

you lived in Austin?

You snag snag yourself a little Cali chick and take back to Tejas?

meant to say “take her back to Tejas”