The Packers are going to be writing a big check to Jordan Love in the very near future, and it’s almost certainly going to be for a brain-melting amount of money.

That’s a good thing.

It’s counterintuitive but good. Because the alternative is far worse.

I certainly understand the sticker shock that comes with doling out contracts that average in the neighborhood of $50 million per year. That’s a lot of money, and we’ve been conditioned by the sports media industry to think big contracts are inherently bad for teams. (It’s really not a big deal, and nobody has ever been prevented from winning by the size of their quarterback’s contract, but that’s an entirely different topic, one we’ll save for another day.) It’s easy for the gut-level reaction to be “how can they pay that one player that much money?” 

Jared Goff’s recent contract is a good example, and my own reaction was along those lines. That much money? For him? It’s hard to get your mind around.

But I’d argue that teams aren’t really paying the player as much as they’re paying the position. When teams are paying big money for a quarterback, they’re really just guarding against the worst situation in pro football: having no reliable starting quarterback.

I’ve spoken about this quite a bit on Blue 58, but it bears repeating here. If you don’t have a quarterback who can reliably win games for you, you have no shot. Contenders can no longer be built around a punishing ground game and an elite defense, if they ever really could be. The 2001 Ravens are the exception that proves the rule, and subsequent defense-powered winners (the 2007 and 2011 Giants, the 2013 Ravens) were powered by hot streaks by otherwise fairly pedestrian QBs. (Seriously, go look up Eli Manning’s postseason stats sometime. He morphed into an entirely different player during his two Super Bowl runs; in 2011 alone he had three postseason games with passer ratings above 103 and two above 110. His career passer rating is 84.1).

It reminds me of the quote attributed to Hillaire Belloc when speaking of British military dominance: “Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not.” When you have a quarterback you want to build around, that can be your mindset as a GM. Whatever happens, we have got our quarterback, and they have not.

You can quibble about which players should and should not be built around. Careers in NFL front offices will rise and fall on the correct answer to that very question. But if you’re confident that you have that guy, you pay him whatever he costs because the alternative is far, far more costly.