While there is some precedent for it (Eli Manning), usually, for a player with no college eligibility left, taking a whole year off from football hasn’t proven to be a good idea. Mike Williams & Maurice Clarett come to mind.
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I am not sure why I am feeling so mean today. But I might suggest that Sanders would be a good fit……
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I’m expecting Tepper to announce himself as the first QB-Owner soon here.
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He is such a tool.
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What’s stopping this from becoming a reality is this thing called ‘ego.’ They all think that they can succeed where others failed.
I gotta think holdouts like this are far more viable now. Any QB worthy of a first round grade, much less the first overall pick, can now just go back to college for a year (or 2, or 3) and earn millions.
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I am very much of the opinion that Arch Manning should pull an Uncle Eli if the Panthers or Bears draft him.
Life imitating art?
Heaven Can Wait.
- Former owner: He got my team. The son of a bitch got my team.
- Advisor to former owner: What kind of pressure did he use, Milt?
- Former owner: Well, I asked for sixty-seven million, and he said “okay.”
- Advisor to former owner: Ruthless bastard.
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If they could get away with this, they would have done it with Dan Snyder. There’s only32 of those jobs available, someone will take it.
Just like someone will agree to coach them.
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“Someone” will definitely take it, but it doesn’t have to be the top QB in the class, or even any of the top 3. And the difference between the Dan Snyder days is that now, those guys will have multi-million-dollar NIL deals waiting for them at any school looking for a starter if they choose to return to college.
At some point, agents for top rookie QBs will likely advise their clients that that’s the best choice. As the column in the OP says, the rules are that if a player doesn’t sign with the team that drafted him, he just goes back in the draft the next year, and if he once again doesn’t sign, then the following year he can enter the league as a free agent.
If you’re Arch Manning’s agent, for example, why would you advise him to take the rookie wage scale contract for David Tepper, if you believe that organization will ruin his career and preventing him from getting a big NFL free agent deal in the future? If Carolina has the top pick, it makes much more sense to advise him to go back to Texas, grab another $3-5 mil to play there for a year, and see if you have better options in 2026. And if Carolina’s picking first again? Heck, make $10 mil or more in NIL and sponsorship money for 2 more years of college, and then enter the league as a FA on a market-rate QB contract, and you’ll be set for life. With the new college football landscape, top QBs have all the leverage.
Fair, but most of this has always been an option. Yes, the NIL deal keeps them at school longer, but they all still exhaust their eligibility eventually.
But players have always been able to sit for a year and not sign with the team that drafted him. Hell, Bo Jackson did it. But he had baseball as a fallback. Most of these kids don’t have anything like that, especially if they’ve already declared or exhausted their eligibility.
Arch is a unique case cause he’s loaded and comes from a family who wrote the playbook. If someone wanted to do something like that, he’d be of a type who might pull it off. Maybe Shedeur too. But those are outliers.
We all remember Manning shunning the Chargers, but we never point out that Rivers DIDN’T, and he was a top, top prospect in that class too. For the OP’s premise to work, all of them need to do it. That’s what collectively means.
So while it may cost them a singular, outlier-y prospect, there will still be plenty of excellent QB prospects lining up to take the job imo.
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Are they really dumb enough to hop right back into the rookie QB pitfalls in a bad QB class? Wait, never mind.
You’re still talking about the “amateur” college football landscape, which is long dead and gone and not coming back. It was a real risk for a player to refuse to sign with the team that drafted them, because most had no real fallback option. That’s just not the case anymore for top QB prospects. Not only do they have other options, they have colleges offering hard cash, millions of dollars, just to delay their pro career one more year.
Let’s look at actual numbers. Shadeur Sanders is getting $4.8 million this year from Colorado. Arch Manning is getting $3.1 million. Let’s consider Manning, as I think he’s in a more stable situation at Texas. And we can compare him to Caleb Williams, who signed a 4 year, $40 million contract with the Bears as a rookie, all guaranteed. That’s a lot of guaranteed money, and no doubt, SOMEBODY would’ve been happy to take that deal from Chicago if Williams opted to go back to USC. But did Williams make the right call?
Contrast that with a market rate FA deal for a young QB. Jordan Love’s new contract–based on one year as a starter!–was 4 years, $220 million, with $160 million guaranteed! So even considering only guaranteed money, Love’s first FA contract was worth 4x Caleb Williams’ rookie contract. So here are two options for Caleb Williams:
Option 1 - Sign with Chicago and get $40 million over the next 4 years, and then nothing (or very little) after that, because Chicago is a terrible organization that destroys QBs’ careers. Total earnings: $40 million.
Option 2 - Return to USC for two more years, at $5 mil per year, $10 mil total. Then enter the league as a FA, sign with a team that DOESN’T destroy QB careers, and get, let’s say $110 million guaranteed for a 4-year contract (which is probably on the low end). Total earnings: $120 million. That’s triple the money, plus having the ability to choose your destination and avoid going to a bad situation. (Which, btw, makes it far more likely that Williams will get a second FA contract that nets him another $200 million.)
This is just a completely different world than the days of Bo Jackson or Eli Manning, and any agent worth a damn will need to factor that reality into the advice they give top QBs entering the draft.
Right, as long as they don’t declare for the draft. In which case, it’s no different than it’s ever been. A player has 72 hours once he declares to change his mind, then he’s in the draft for good. He can’t go back to school afterwards, declaring for the draft ends his college eligibility.
Sure, they know what teams will be picking early when they have to make that decision, but that’s always been true. Peyton didn’t declare for the 1997 draft cause he didn’t want to play for the Jets, so he returned to school. Some say the same thing happened with Andrew Luck and the Panthers, but I think he just really loved being in college.
What I’m saying is they can’t declare for the draft, tell the team picking first not to take them, then use the NIL as their leverage. Their college eligibility is exhausted - they can’t go back. Which is as true today as it was in Bo Jackson’s day.
Now they can threaten the team picking 1st BEFORE they’ve declared, but again, that has always been true. As long as they have eligibility remaining, they could decide not to declare. Just like Peyton did. The NIL makes it more palatable to go back to school, but the option to go back has always been there (again, as long as they have eligibility remaining).
But from the team’s point of view, it’s no different. Either the guy’s in the class or he isn’t. They don’t have to worry about being leveraged by the NIL once that’s happened. The player can still try to pull an Eli Manning or an Elway, but the NIL will have no effect on that if they’ve already declared.
Yes, but the millions per year to delay going pro doesn’t just make college more palatable; it makes it foolish to allow yourself to be drafted by a bad organization–and risk hundreds of millions in future earnings with that choice.
Why is this a different world than the days of Bo and Eli? Because first, the rookie wage scale sets a maximum limit on the first overall pick’s contract–a limit that’s literally a fraction of a FA contract. And second, because if you can get $5 mil/year for delaying 1 or 2 seasons, it becomes a simple math problem: On one hand, you can take $40 mil guaranteed. On the other, you can take $5 mil + $40 mil to delay one year, or $10 mil + $100 million+ to delay two. Agents are pretty good at math problems like these!
The notion that nothing has really changed from when Eli threatened to sit out–when rookie QB contracts were the same as free agents, and you were giving up a LOT more cash in hand to stay in college for zero dollars–just doesn’t make sense. For comparison, Eli signed a 6 year, $54 million deal as a rookie. In 2004! For top college QBs today, this is a very, very different choice!
(Also, the 72-hour window is not a big deal, it just means that agents will advise top QBs to not “officially” declare for the draft until the last possible minute.)
Just to respond to this last part, which I guess is where we really disagree, rookies and their agents will know who’s picking first long before they need to officially declare for the draft. They can make it clear they have no intention of playing for that team. I suppose a team could try to screw them over by luring them into believing they won’t draft them until they declare, and then drafting them anyway, but this seems unlikely to me.
Yes, but there is a deadline by which they must do so well before the draft. Not a big deal for the teams.
To me their reason for going back to school is irrelevant, that’s why. From the team’s perspective, they’re either in the draft of their not. It doesn’t matter why. Yes, some will be more likely to return because of the NIL, but they have ALWAYS been able to return. And the teams will have plenty of warning.
So let’s say someone like Nussmeier becomes the slam dunk top QB option in the draft (not what I believe, just using him as an example). He doesn’t want to play for Carolina. OK, fine. But he wouldn’t mind playing for the Raiders. How does he threaten Carolina into making that happen?
He can’t say he’ll go back to school and take an NIL deal - he’s either declared or he hasn’t. He can say I won’t declare if you’re gonna draft me - but what is he gonna do, take their word if they say “we won’t?” Seems like a pretty big risk. And if he does take their word and declares, he’s no different from Eli or Elway - telling a team not to draft him without the option of going back to school. It’s the same as it’s ever been.
In the above scenarios, WHY he goes back to school is irrelevant. He can go back for money, he can go back for a girl, he can go back because he loves college, he can go back because he hates the team picking first.
But he’s either in the draft or he isn’t.
And what happens the following year when they’ve exhausted their eligibility and still don’t like the team picking first? They’re shit out of luck, and now, if you believe they ever had any, they have NO leverage.
Which means if you decide to exercise your leverage the year before and go back to school, you do so knowing you will put yourself in a position without leverage the following year. That’s no reason NOT to do it, but at some point you’re going to the NFL, whether it’s to a place you want to go or not.
Unless you want to retire.
Listen… we can disagree about how much actual leverage this translates to for a top QB prospect. But I’m going to just invert your own point: regardless of what this looks like to teams drafting in the top 10, what I’ve been emphasizing this entire thread is what it looks like from the AGENT’S perspective.
This year, for example, college players don’t need to declare for the draft until last week of January 2025. The top of the draft order will be set four weeks earlier. So, taking your example, if Nussmeier is the consensus top player in the draft, and he knows that Carolina is picking first, his agent would be foolish to advise him to allow them to draft him–not when Nussmeier would be well paid to stay in school another year and play this game again in 2026.
In this case, the leverage is that Nussmeier’s agent can tell David Tepper that if he intends to draft his guy, Nussmeier will just forego the draft this year. And critically, * Tepper knows this is a viable option for him. *
Tepper could refuse to say whether he intends to draft him, but that telegraphs his intent. Or he could say he doesn’t want a guy who doesn’t want to be in Carolina, and then draft him anyway out of pique. But again, this seems unlikely. (Well, maybe more likely for David Tepper.)
The bottom line, and my entire point, is that Nussmeier not only can refuse to play for Carolina, he should, and if his agent has his best career interest and future earnings in mind, he’ll advise him to do that.
You can I can go back and forth about this, but we’ll have real answers soon enough. I predict it will become much more common, starting this year, for top QBs to tell certain teams they won’t declare if that team plans to draft them. We’ll see if I’m right or not.
Fair enough, it’s clear we’re not gonna agree.
I personally think the only thing that’s changed is staying in school is slightly more viable now, but that’s always been on the table. Peyton did it. Luck might have done it. Nothing is new about it from that perspective. They still have to declare very early in the process.
The original post of mine you responded to said this:
That was the main reason I originally chimed in. Basically, even if there’s an Eli Manning in this class - or more of them going forward - there will always be a Philip Rivers around to take the job.
And it was in response to the idea that the class should collectively refuse to play for Tepper. That was the notion I found unrealistic.
And maybe you’re right and there’s an uptick in players who go back to school because they don’t want to play for the team picking number 1, but if there is, I personally think it will be a very small jump. Because many things have to come together for it to happen:
- The player has to be the consensus top prospect. That’s only true about half the time.
- The team picking first has to a true dumpster fire. This year Caleb was the consensus #1, but he was fine going to Chicago.
- The player has to have another year of eligibility remaining. If Cam Ward becomes the consensus top player this year, he has no choice but to go where he’s drafted. He’s out of college eligibility.
- The NIL money has to be good. This is probably the easiest condition to meet, but it still has to be met.
And the following doesn’t have to be true, but it helps.
- The team picking at the top has to need a QB. Teams with young QBs often suck, so it’s pretty common for the top team to not need QB. If Washington or NE gets the first pick for example, they’re not taking QB. The Giants might be 2nd and the QB prospect might be fine going there. But what’s to stop the Panthers from trading up to #1 again? Or some other team he doesn’t want to play for? There’s really no one for the QB prospect to leverage in that scenario. He can’t get the Commies or NE to refuse to trade down by threatening to go back to school.
They already made millions. In that respect it’s different. They aren’t sitting out wondering how they will make ends meet, or how they can better their family. They have options.
We can say they will never be happy with the team selecting them. That is certainly possible, but I think that’s an extreme. The game has changed where these players are making serious money in college. That definitely gives them a leverage that was not there in the past.