Are the Detroit Lions building their team the right way?

Detroit Lions and other Quarterbacks

Q: Did the Lions, in fact, make a mistake by paying Matthew Stafford an average of $27 million dollars per season for his five-year extension?

Since the Lions biggest expenditure is at quarterback, and much was made of the top five quarterbacks not making the playoffs, it bears looking into. KCW is not simply rubber-stamping the contract. It’s a ton of money and locks the Lions in for a sizeable period of time.

Perhaps you feel as we do, at least in part, “What other option was there?” There are only so many starter-caliber quarterbacks to go around even though a large expenditure can be a risk. The Lions depth at quarterback was also not conducive to letting Stafford go in free agency even if he had not had a streak of seven 4,000 yards passing seasons.

To be objective, Stafford has had a poor year this year but his past half dozen years have been near elite in every category, stats from Pro Football Reference. The team’s record has not always been stellar but the franchise is one game under .500 in the last eight years under Stafford and his flawed compatriots.

Birkett correctly points out that four teams with a $20 million dollar man made the playoffs of the fourteen with one. If you count the Eagles combined expense of Nick Foles and Carson Wentz ($13.6M and $7.3M, respectively) they spent in excess of the same marker, making the number five. In reality, by cap hit six of the twelve teams, not counting the Eagles, have top-salary signal-callers.

Also, more than half of the NFL will have one next year (21 with cap hits of more than 20 million).

Of the playoff teams that had starters on rookie deals, the Cowboys, Chiefs, Texans, Rams, and Bears, only two advanced from their original seeding, the Chiefs and the Rams.