Ben Roethlisberger and Joe Flacco are among the 16 NFL players who are part of the $100 million club. It's a fraternity that includes 13 quarterbacks, with Flacco ($120.6 million), Dallas' Tony Romo ($119.5 million), Green Bay's Aaron Rodgers ($110 million) and Atlanta's Matt Ryan ($103.75 million) as the newest members after signing lucrative contacts during the offseason. The teams who seem to have plenty of talented depth -- San Francisco, Seattle, Cincinnati -- are able to do so because they haven't had to pay their quarterbacks the $100 million contracts that are increasingly becoming the norm in the NFL. Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 86WARD's Take: For the Steelers, it's not Roethlisberger's contract. He still has a large one coming. For the Steelers, it's keeping old talent too long, it's mismanaging the cap, it's giving players like LaMarr Woodley $8M/yr salary and a $14M cap hit. Polamalu is a $11M cap hit, Ike Taylor a $10.5M hit. Willie Colon sitting with $4.3M in dead money doesn't help. It's crapty draft classes (2008.) $100 Million QBs are the going rate for a quality QB and teams have to pay it if they want top talent.
yeah, people always fail to look at outside factors. i do absolutely think it's a factor in the ravens' case, but not so much some of the other teams. it's just something you have to account for.
you are correct Ward. Ben's $100 mill was spread out over 8 years so he is not one of the QB's who is eating up nearly 20% of a teams' entire cap space by himself.
bunch of malarkey . Every team has an army of accountants, they know what they are doing and its not the cause of teams losing or not finding certain players. Pittsburghs team as a whole is just old and beat up. No amount of money can change that quickly. Its just the sports life cycle
