It's basically a 2yr/28 mill pay for performance contract while most of the guaranteed $ is apparently guaranteed by injury and not fully guaranteed.
Kaepernick has been overrated by the media, he's not been a very good qb aside from that one playoff run. he's got all the physical tools obviously. they betting on him developing and if he doesn't they cut ties. this is basically a year by year deal, niners can cut him whenever they want. i have huge doubts about him becoming a franchise qb and apparently the niners do as well. only 12 mil signing bonus is guaranteed. kaep should fire his agent.
Yup very team friendly, only guaranteed for injury, and it has whatever the opposite of escalators are. Pretty interesting contract, good for SF, very good. Kaep is betting on himself and performance to get the majority of the contract but still gets a pay upgrade in the process.
wow, yeah looking at the details... this deal kinda rules. If THIS is a template for future deals than maybe the Panthers, Seahawks and such aren't so screwed when contract time arrives. Big money deals only hurt when its hard to get out of, this is easy as hell to leave if the Niners want to. they could cut him in march of NEXT YEAR while only paying him something like 12 million. the guarantees are legendary but not FULLY guaranteed, theres just a bit of that huge sum owed on an annual basis based on his previous years work and the feasibility of him doing well the next year. way to juke the system San Francisco. And way to give your team some flexibility Mr. Kaepernick.
49ers are blazing a trail here and it's about time somebody did this. Paying a QB 10% of your cap is probably unavoidable but structuring the deal so that if it goes bad it doesn't take the team down with it is basic negotiating 101. Kudos to the 49ers for managing the process well.
We'll see if other teams/players follow. It will be really exciting for football if QB contracts come back down to earth, at least for the not MVP type QBs
Kaep is a first read guy he isnt smart/quick enough to go trough read progressions , good atheletic ability , huge arm he really shoudlt fire his agent this contract is even pushing his skill level in my opinion ofc what carrys San Fran is the defense.
Kap is over rated as fuck. With the talent in SF, you'd have to be mind blowingly bad to screw up. I mean he's decent at times, and had some great stretches, but he's not "record level" contract worthy. Look what Flacco's over loaded contract did to the Ravens. SF will regress as well.
But if they don't find a better replacement, they are committed to a pretty big contract, unless he reaches elite level in the next year or 2, he's over paid. Maybe he will. I think he ends up like Flacco. Very good, but not elite.
no, they aren't. thats the point. they can cut him NEXT year and only have 9 million dollars of dead money to deal with. the "Guaranteed" 60 million is only such in spurts, all he's absolutely owed is his 12 million dollar signing bonus, not to mention theres disincentives if he doesn't make all pro or the super bowl. if he's as overrated as you say the Niners have multiple points to get out of this contract. thats what makes such a great deal, he has to keep playing at a high level to earn those big bucks. really, every major QB deal should be like this its really team friendly despite the potential size.
The reason they're able to pull this type of contract structure off is because there's a high probability he'll never be anything special despite flashing potential in the athletic aspects of the job. If he can somehow learn to be a smart QB with good accuracy everyone is happy but the agent probably realized he isn't a safe enough bet to command a huge salary with big guarantees. Then you add on the fact that Kap seems like a narcissistic overconfident turd as a person so he obviously chooses the big number on paper because he doesn't see how he could fall on his face and see nothing out of the back end of the contract. Situation is kind of a perfect storm I don't think you can really extrapolate this is going to start setting the trend for most big QB contracts. The truly elite guys can tell the team to f themselves, never hold onto the ball long enough to get hit for a season and get paid huge guaranteed money on the open market. The guys that have shown even less than Kap will take whatever traditional middling contract they can get. Wilson is very vaguely similar in that he also came in under the radar and can run, but he doesn't rely on his legs nearly as much and is a generally smarter and better QB at this point. His situation is probably as close as you're going to get for the near future and it doesn't seem very close to me at all. I expect Wilson will sign a nominally smaller contract with a more traditional structure, but we'll see.
If the Seahawks win another Super Bowl Wilson is going to want a traditional franchise QB contract and that will be interesting to watch. If you think about it almost all of the Super Bowls of the last generation have been won by great teams that also in many cases had a great QB. We've turned that into you have to have a great QB to win in the popular opinion but in fact you need to have a great team to win. The 1990's dynasties - Cowboys, 49ers, Broncos were all great teams that also had a great QB. In the case of the Broncos they couldn't win a Super Bowl until they put a great team around the great QB and then they went back-to-back. The 1996 Packers had Brett Favre but they also had a great defense led by Reggie White. The 1999 Rams had two of the best players in NFL history in Faulk and Warner and Faulk was the better of the two. Since then you have a small handful of Super Bowl winners in which you could argue that the QB was the whole story. Indy in 2006, New Orleans in 2009, that's about it. So what the 49ers did with Kaepernick was to bow to common sense. It doesn't matter if Kaepernick is a great QB or not. What matters is that they put a great team around Kaepernick and then if he's a great QB they have a real shot. That's what the Ravens should have done with Joe Flacco. That was a rare misstep by an organization that doesn't make many of them.
Give it another couple of years and NFL players will probably be openly bashing DeMaurice Smith, Man of the People.
Players are never going to have the leverage in a sport where careers are measured in a very short span of years and owners own teams for decades. What exactly was the NFLPA supposed to do? Go on another strike that takes a season out of the two or three that most players have already? The players negotiated for (and got) the one thing that they had some control over which was their work place safety and working conditions. They got full contact exercises dramatically reduced. They got concussions put under the microscope. They got a clear understanding from the NFL that unsafe and hazardous practices and tactics on the field will be legislated out of the game as they are uncovered and become clear. They were never, ever, in a million years going to get the controlling share of the finances. Instead they (finally) negotiated for a safer workplace less likely to leave them crippled for life after their very short career. If you have some idea about how they could have gotten more money out of the owners feel free to express it but I just don't see it. The union would have frayed under the pressures of a strike and the NFL would have turtled until they came back in. Look at how the TV payments were structured. Owners still got paid during a non-owner caused work stoppage and the players didn't. Nothing to do about that. In a baseball strike the average player is out on strike with the expectation they'll have 5 more years at least to reap the fruits of the stoppage. In football the average player is looking at being a training camp cut pretty quickly and none of them think they'll make it much past 30 anyway.
I was talking about if they couldn't cut him, because nobody better was available. If he becomes elite, then great. If not, he's getting paid too much. That's all I'm saying.
Desean Jackson is an employee protected by a collective bargaining agreement and represented by a certified labor union. Think about that for moment.
