Before there was Michael Penix Jr., there was Jordan Love.
Four years before the Atlanta Falcons made the most confusing move of the 2024 draft -- selecting Penix eighth after signing Kirk Cousins to big money one month earlier -- the Green Bay Packers traded up in the first round to take Love. This set off a firestorm of criticism. How dare the Packers, with 36-year-old legend Aaron Rodgers still under contract for multiple seasons, use such valuable resources on a quarterback? They risked alienating Rodgers and could have used that pick on someone (a receiver?) who made the 2020 team better.
"You think about those things, but the value of the quarterback position in general really kind of trumps everything else," Packers GM Brian Gutekunst said last week. "If you have the opportunity to get a quarterback, you have to take it."
This is a core Packers philosophy, rooted in the early 1990s, when then-GM Ron Wolf established organizational priorities that still govern team decisions today. Even after trading for Brett Favre in February 1992, Wolf drafted Heisman-winning quarterback Ty Detmer in the ninth round of that year's draft. The following year, he drafted Mark Brunell in the fifth round. Over an eight-year stretch from 1992 to '99, there was only one year (1994) in which Wolf did not select a quarterback in the draft.
"You just don't ever know when you're going to need one," said Gutekunst, who joined the Packers as a scout in 1999. "We were lucky here for years that Brett and Aaron stayed healthy, but you never know. So you're really protecting the organization. Drafting quarterbacks, developing quarterbacks protects the organization."
The Love pick worked out on multiple levels. Rodgers earned MVP honors as the Packers won 13 games and the NFC North title in each of the next two seasons. After dipping to 8-9 in 2022, they traded Rodgers to the New York Jets and installed Love as the starter, and he led them to the second round of the playoffs last season.
Finding the right QB is just one piece of NFL roster building, a year-round jigsaw puzzle for decision-makers. Ideas on the best ways to build a contender vary from team to team. The Packers' approach has worked for them, but it is by no means the only way to do it.
Over the past several weeks, in interviews with a dozen NFL GMs, we tried to pull back the curtain on how NFL teams construct their rosters, digging deep on quarterbacks, contract structure, draft philosophies, free agency theories and the importance of culture. No one claims to have it all figured out, but there are a few common threads. And for most teams, it all starts in the same place.
Jump to a topic:
Finding the QB | Identifying value
Navigating the cap | Building culture
Finding the right quarterback
Teams find themselves in different quarterback situations. Do you have a QB who's still on his rookie deal, a veteran getting paid $50 million-plus annually, or something in the middle? Is your guy the long-term answer? Can you win with him? Will you win because of him?
"Obviously, the quarterback is No. 1," Tampa Bay Buccaneers GM Jason Licht said. "And if you know in the draft a quarterback is going to be lights-out -- like, you know he's going to be Patrick Mahomes or Joe Burrow -- you'd offer literally 10 first-round picks for that guy. It wouldn't matter. It would be worth it. But it's such a crapshoot."
Licht has lived multiple iterations of the quarterback continuum, in terms of success and finances. He was a second-year GM in 2015 when Tampa Bay used the No. 1 pick on Jameis Winston. Five years later, he took maybe the biggest free agent swing of all time and signed Tom Brady, who led the Bucs to the franchise's second Super Bowl title in his first year there. When Brady retired after the 2022 season, Licht took a low-risk shot on Baker Mayfield, who led the Buccaneers to the divisional round of the playoffs. And this offseason, the Bucs rewarded Mayfield with a three-year, $100 million contract -- a bargain, perhaps, by current starting QB standards but still a tougher number to work around than the $4 million Mayfield earned in 2023.
"We had Jameis, it didn't work out, but then we realized that while we had Jameis we were putting together a pretty good team around him thinking he'd be the guy," Licht said. "When we decided to move on, it was the team we'd built around Jameis that Brady wanted to be a part of."
Most of the talent on that 2020 Buccaneers roster was homegrown, a testament to the draft-and-develop method of roster building on which every franchise tries to learn as much as possible. A trade for Jason Pierre-Paul here, a Ryan Jensen free agent signing there, but the Bucs had mostly built from within, developing their own players and signing them to contract extensions. And it was Brady's arrival that elevated that roster from 7-9 to an 11-5 Super Bowl champ.
"You draft a [a QB], and once you realize that's your guy, you should be asking, 'Can I win a championship with him?'" Buffalo Bills GM Brandon Beane said. "Otherwise, why are you paying him what you're required to pay him?"
The NFL is a salary cap league, and even with the cap at a record-high $255.4 million for 2024, teams with big-money quarterbacks have to make tough decisions elsewhere on their rosters to accommodate that salary. Bills quarterback Josh Allen's cap number last season was $18.6 million. This year, it's $30.4 million, which would be the eighth highest in the league among QBs. It's scheduled to go up to $43.2 million in 2025 and $63.9 million in 2026.
Yes, GMs can restructure or extend to dance around the cap rules, but they still have to budget around a big number, which is one reason the Bills traded Stefon Diggs and moved on from higher-priced veterans like Tre'Davious White and Mitch Morse this offseason.
The average 2024 cap hit for the 10 highest-paid quarterbacks is $42.19 million -- or about 16.5% of the cap -- as of now. There's a pretty wide range within that group though. Deshaun Watson, with a league-high cap number of roughly $63.8 million, accounts for 25% of the Cleveland Browns' salary cap. (They'll likely restructure his deal this summer to knock that number down.) Jared Goff, whose $27.2 million is currently the 10th-highest 2024 quarterback cap number, accounts for 11% of the Detroit Lions' cap.
"If the top quarterbacks are getting 18% [of the cap], then the next time you go to do it, it's gone up to 24%, you've got to take a long look at it," Beane said. "If it's 24, do you have the quarterback who can get you over the top when you're cutting back elsewhere? Maybe when you start getting to one-fourth of the cap, you're thinking, 'That's over the line for me.' So it's about what tier is your quarterback in and where do you draw the line?"
The Los Angeles Rams drew the line in 2021. After selecting Goff with the top pick in 2016, reaching the Super Bowl with him as their starter in 2018 and then rewarding him with a four-year, $134 million extension in the summer of 2019, the Rams looked at their roster and decided Goff was not the guy to get them over the top. They traded him to the Lions in a deal that brought Matthew Stafford in 2021.
"You have to assess, what phase of the quarterback are you in?" Rams GM Les Snead said. "Are you still figuring out if he's the one? At the time ... some of our core players, most of them were in their prime or looking at the last four, five years of their careers, and they were kind of ready to take advantage of it now. So we were always going to need a quarterback who wasn't just starting his own career. Jared was probably not there yet, whereas Matthew had made the climb. So he was a very specific piece of the puzzle for our group."
Stafford's salary-cap number that year, after the Rams restructured his contract, came in at $20 million. Fortunately, L.A. was already thinking about how to build around an eight-figure quarterback cap number, having extended Goff two years earlier.
"Once we're paying top dollar, we knew we were going to have to rely on players that were on rookie contracts to be Robins to the Batmen," Snead said.
Identifying value and knowing when to spend
A mythology labeled "F--- them picks" sprung up around those Super Bowl champion Rams. Snead and the organization leaned into it and had a whole bunch of fun with the perception that they were the ultimate forget-the-future, win-now team. But as is often the case, it was an oversimplification.
Yes, the Rams had built the top end of the roster by trading away first- and second-round picks for the likes of Stafford, Jalen Ramsey and Von Miller. But in the five years leading up to their title, the Rams actually made 45 draft picks -- more than every other team except the Minnesota Vikings. They collected midround and late-round picks by strategically working the compensatory pick formula and used them in very directed ways.
"I think the volume helps," Snead said, "but also when you have a roster like we had and you can say, 'If these players stay healthy, we know we're going to be in it,' it's a lot easier to step back and see, 'OK, we have a void at specific positions. Now, what skill do these players need to be able to come in and contribute?' We ended up probably tilting toward older players, players who'd played four years, guys with a high floor instead of maybe more upside guys."
Snead cited two examples:
Defensive tackle Greg Gaines, a 2019 fourth-rounder: "We felt like he was a guy who was going to be sound in his gap, which was what we needed because Aaron Donald was going to be a little more free, play a little less structured. And that's great; that's who he is and he's one of the greatest to ever do it. But if you have two players who freelance, then that's a problem."
Safety Jordan Fuller, a 2020 sixth-rounder: "We had some really talented guys who were going to do their own thing in the secondary, so we were looking for someone who had the leadership skills but also the football acumen to be able to call a defense, get everybody in the right spot."
Snead suggested the key was front-office discipline on a number of levels. The discipline to pass on exciting players with upside in favor of ones who bring the specific traits. The discipline to let a player you like leave in free agency, knowing a compensatory pick would be coming. The discipline to actually play young midround draft picks alongside veterans.
"The question is: Can you, in an unbiased way as an organization, identify what window you're in?" Snead said. "Are you building? Have you broken through? Are you now in this contending window? If you're building, you certainly don't give up a second-round and a third-round pick for a player who might only be there a few months."
Some do that anyway. At the 2023 trade deadline, Chicago Bears GM Ryan Poles shipped a second-round pick to the Washington Commanders for edge rusher Montez Sweat, who was in the final year of his contract. A few days later, the Bears signed him to a four-year, $98 million extension.
They paid a premium for the 27-year-old, but Poles believes it's important to recognize when it's worth stretching for a player.
"Kind of knowing when to hit the gas and when to hit the brake," Poles said. "You look at age, production. We saw the talent on tape and then looked at the age and knew that provided a runway for the player to come up in our organization. You want to do everything in a very disciplined way, but you also know you don't have forever. These contracts start running out, and organizationally you have to show improvement if you want to convince everyone to stick with the plan."
Also at last year's trade deadline, Seattle Seahawks GM John Schneider traded a second-round pick to the New York Giants for defensive tackle Leonard Williams, who was in the final year of his deal. In March, Seattle re-signed Williams for three years and $64.5 million. After trading such a high pick for the player, Schneider basically had to sign him this spring. But Williams had played well, and Schneider believed he had earned the new contract -- even if he wasn't in Seattle's long-range plan at this time last year.
It was a lesson Schneider says he learned years ago, when Russell Wilson aged out of his rookie quarterback deal as Seattle started trying to plan ahead on other areas of the roster. Knowing it would be tough to keep the famed "Legion of Boom" secondary together, Schneider started trying to find those players' replacements in the draft a year or two before their contracts were up.
"Roster building is never like this clean slate," Schneider said. "People say, 'Start from within,' you know? And yeah, that's awesome. But if you're drafting well, are you going to let Earl Thomas leave just because you sign Kam Chancellor? No, you keep your best players. Some of the mistakes I've made were looking at, well, Earl and Kam are coming up, so you have to draft their replacements. Now you're pushing those players up your board artificially. And that's how we drafted Tedric Thompson when we should've drafted George Kittle. Philosophically, where you make your biggest mistakes in the draft is when you're drafting for a need."
Of course, drafting Thompson in the fourth round in 2017 made sense at the time, with Seattle anticipating that Thomas would be moving on shortly thereafter, leaving a void at safety. But looking back, the Seahawks would have been better off taking Kittle -- who went in Round 5 and has emerged as a superstar tight end in San Francisco -- even though he wouldn't have filled an immediate need.
The point is, there's more than one way to put this all together. And not seriously considering every possible avenue creates a disadvantage.
"Any team that has a QB on a veteran deal, you do have to look at ways where you can find relative value in other areas of roster construction," Browns GM Andrew Berry said. "Then it's about: Where are the other areas where you can find strategic advantages? How do you structure certain deals? When do you engage in extension talks with your current players you want to keep? How do you manage your spending on a multiyear basis?
"The general manager's responsibility is to have a foot in the present and a foot in the future. And depending on where you are in your roster's life cycle, that can determine how hard you lean into one or the other of those."
Navigating the salary cap
Picking the right players is important, but GMs also have to maneuver around the salary cap. When the quarterback is suddenly eating up a great deal more of the cap than he was in his early seasons, it becomes a complex dance. The San Francisco 49ers, for instance, aren't always going to be able to have the highest-paid running backs, receivers, left tackles, linebackers and edge rushers once Brock Purdy stops making $900,000 per year. But the solution won't be to just go cheap everywhere else. It'll involve making judicious decisions and building contracts that work together.
"Really what it does is lessen the number of veteran contracts you can have on your team," said one GM who asked not to be named. "So you really have to pick and choose if you want to add a veteran who's not a starter. Or you pick a position where you may want to add a veteran but you can't afford to. Guys on rookie deals are so valuable. If I'm ever looking to make a trade, and it's player-for-player, I need a player on a rookie contract coming back to us."
Every team has cap and contract specialists who make sure it all fits. Sometimes, that job involves explaining to the GM why certain ideas he has may not be possible. For the Buccaneers, that role belongs to assistant GM Mike Greenberg.
"When I moved up into this job, there were definitely conversations where I'd say, 'Why don't we just stick some of that money into the third year?'" Licht said. "And Mike would have to explain, 'Well, we can't do that because of what happens to this other deal that year.'"
There are defined principles of contract structure that vary from team to team, too. The Cincinnati Bengals, for instance, have a longstanding practice of not guaranteeing any money beyond the signing bonus. It cost them free agents. Famously, their refusal to guarantee money in the second year of a contract for Andrew Whitworth led the offensive tackle to leave for the Rams in free agency. Cincinnati broke this precedent last year with Burrow's extension, and contract-watchers around the league are now waiting to find out whether they'll do it again when it's time to re-sign receiver Ja'Marr Chase.
You can also look at the Buccaneers and Las Vegas Raiders, who for years were among teams that either never or rarely put signing bonuses in contracts. Signing bonuses are used as a means of working around the cap, allowing teams to spread out the amount of the bonus for as many as five years even if they're paying the whole thing in cash up front. But the Raiders and Bucs have preferred to keep their cash and cap spending equal, thereby avoiding big dead money charges that result when a player is released with years left on a contract -- including a big signing bonus.
Then there are the Philadelphia Eagles, who have used an option-heavy structure in a lot of their big recent deals. Jalen Hurts' extension pays him a minimum $1.125 million base salary this season but has an option bonus for 2029 worth $38.875 million, which he will receive this year to bring his total pay for 2024 to $40 million. Option bonuses -- in which the guaranteed money for the future option season converts to current-year money on a specified date if the option is not officially exercised -- are treated like signing bonuses for cap purposes, so the Eagles can spread Hurts' 2024 option bonus money out evenly over the next five seasons. That keeps his 2024 cap charge at a very manageable $13.558 million. Each year of Hurts' deal functions this way through 2028, which is why there are void years as far out as 2033. It's complicated, but it's basically Philly's way of pre-restructuring a contract to save cap space.
You get the idea. Every team does it differently, and it's all about budgeting. And things change over time. Teams like the Bucs and Raiders that used to shy away from putting void years in deals for cap purposes started to do so in 2021, when the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic dropped the salary cap from $198.2 million to $182.5 million. Deals that had been done under the assumption that the cap would continue to rise (or least not drop!) had to be reworked.
New deals had to be built around new cap realities. Take the Buccaneers, who suddenly had to change longstanding contract structure practices and effectively go into massive cap debt. Tampa Bay carried more than $80 million last season in dead-money cap charges, and it has another $56 million or so in dead money this year.
"Yeah, we borrowed money and put money on the credit card bill, and we're still paying it off," Licht said. "Our owners saw an opportunity to win it, keep it together, then go try to win it again, so they were on board with the play, even knowing what was to come in the future."
The NFL has a variety of ownership structures, and some teams are better equipped to dole out big signing bonuses than others due to the wealth of their owners. (More recent additions to the ownership ranks -- the Walton family in Denver, David Tepper in Carolina, etc. -- bought the teams with billions they'd made from other businesses, while other teams -- the Bengals, Giants, Chargers, Steelers, etc. -- are owned by families who've owned them forever and for whom the team is the main business.) An antiquated rule that requires teams to keep the guaranteed money in their players' contracts in escrow makes it challenging for some franchises to hand out big guarantees.
"In terms of [preferred structure], every GM's got to understand ownership, what they want, where are they flush with cash, where are they not," Beane said. "Some teams might sign a player and pay three-fourths of the bonus up front while others might spread it out over 12 months.
"You have to look out long-term for where your dollars are going to be. What's it going to cost you in Year 2, Year 4, Year 6 of that deal? Where are the spikes in that deal? And make sure you don't put yourself in position where you have too many guys spiking in the same year."
Drafting well, picking the right players, developing them and figuring out how they all fit together is the art of roster building. Constructing the contracts to keep as many good players on the team as possible for as long as possible is the science.
"Probably just as important as anything else," Berry said. "If you're able to manage your contracts more effectively than your opponents, you're able to put more talent on the field."
Building the culture
Then there are the areas of roster construction that can be tougher to quantify. And team culture and the non-football ways in which a player may or may not fit on a roster aren't one-size-fits-all either. A player who's seen as difficult by one team may fit better on another team.
Maybe the other players in his position group are more similar and/or welcoming. Maybe the coaches have a style that's better suited to drawing out the best of him. Maybe the organization is set up to deliver a certain kind of help he needs but wasn't getting at his previous stop.
As several of the GMs interviewed said, a big part of the culture piece of roster building requires honest self-assessment of your building's infrastructure. What kind of support staff does the team have? Who are the veterans on the roster who will have the strongest influence on the player? Who are the coaches?
"It's evaluating your evaluators," Schneider said. "How good are your area scouts at discerning stuff? What are the interviews telling you? You have to evaluate the coach who's going to be coaching the player. You're evaluating everybody in the building who's touching that player."
Poles said he keeps a "decision log" in which he records every decision he has made since becoming the Bears GM and what he's learned from it. An example, he says, is what kind of impact a good, respected veteran at a key position can have on the rest of the roster.
"When we added Montez, there was a different feel to our defense," Poles said of the 2023 trade for Sweat. "I didn't realize the impact it can have when you have a dude at a premium position like that. Other players' confidence and swagger changed once they had a dude up front. And just the accountability, guys don't want to let down a guy like that."
Poles also said his approach to this past offseason changed once the franchise decided it would be picking QB Caleb Williams first overall and moving on from Justin Fields. In fact, he made the trade for receiver Keenan Allen with the new starting quarterback in mind.
"Because of how he plays the game, how much wisdom he has, how quarterback-friendly he is," Poles said. "You look at what he did for Justin Herbert in his rookie season. All of that played a role in deciding to pursue that particular player to help a rookie quarterback."
There are coaches and GMs whose track records tell us they're good at the draft or good at spotting and acquiring talent. But in the end, the only way it's all going to work is if that team's building is set up to sustain success -- if there's continuity and consistency in the decision-making and a team spirit behind all aspects of roster construction.
Look at the Seahawks leaning so hard on the draft-and-develop model, for example. Why has Seattle been able to sustain a program that effectively trains the replacements for veterans who age out?
"Coaches' buy-in," Schneider answered. "When you're drafting players and the coaches are kind of like, 'Ehhh ...' then maybe they're not going to spend as much time developing the guy because they don't really feel like he's their guy. So you have to have the buy-in from the staff like, 'OK, here are [2011 fifth-rounder] Richard Sherman's deficiencies, but here are all of his strengths, and let's work together to accentuate his strengths and we'll have a great player.'"
Interestingly, Schneider used to work in Green Bay, where the roster-building principles have been the same for more than 30 years. Gutekunst drafted Love, but because Rodgers had three more years left in Green Bay at the time, the Packers never really got the benefit of having the quarterback on a cheap rookie deal. "Cost of doing business," Gutekunst said. Remember, he doesn't think it's possible to overspend resources at quarterback.
But Gutekunst's team managed a smooth transition with a huge number of young players around Love last season, and he didn't chalk it up to those players' talent or pre-draft evaluations.
"A lot of it is just opportunity. The opportunity to play, and to play in games," he said. "[Former Packers GM] Ted Thompson was really good about that -- clearing the decks so a guy could get the opportunity to play. And then if you have a coaching staff that's really tuned into the development of players and having confidence to put them out there as young guys, living with their mistakes because they know the payoff, that's a big deal."
That's not even roster building. That's team building. And it doesn't seem like you can be any good at the former if you haven't figured out the latter.