If Seahawks draft a QB, this is the one thing they must do

What Mahomes, Purdy, Lamar, and Goff all have in common and the Seahawks should do it too

The NFL is not a copycat league.

Okay, it is. But then there are other strategies in the league, Super Bowl-proven strategies, that for some reason get treated as though they don’t exist or don’t matter that much. Tom Brady never wanted to be the highest-paid QB in the NFL or even close to it, as he didn’t have a salary cap hit over $25 million until 2023…when he was out of the league.

Say what you want about Brady, that he was rich outside of football, that he married rich, that he was paid under the table, nothing will change the fact that the New England Patriots won more games and more Super Bowls because of how underpaid he was relative to his peers, especially in his 30s and 40s.

Yet nobody does copies this. Nobody.

If anything the opposite is true, which is that the more that QB salaries go up, the more obsessed people seem to be with reaching a bigger number. You can’t even have conversations with fans now about quarterbacks that doesn’t somehow center around their contracts and what they deserve. Last year’s offseason: “Pay Lamar Jackson” “Pay Jalen Hurts” “Pay Joe Burrow” “Pay Justin Herbert”

Nobody ever said: “Win a Super Bowl, Lamar” “Win a playoff game, Justin”

Don’t confuse this with thinking that I’m arguing that they don’t deserve this—although I wouldn’t be against a policy that says no NFL player can make more than Patrick Mahomes until he wins at least one Super Bowl—because players deserve it the most, but there seems to be a gigantic contradiction at hand here between what most of them say and what most of them do: If you wanted to win Super Bowls as a quarterback, you would take a discount.

Even Patrick Mahomes.

If I’m Mahomes and if I want to chase Brady’s seven rings, I am going to the Chiefs front office and saying, “Just tell me what to do and how I can help build the best roster”. Answer me this question: Is there anything that would scare the rest of the AFC more than the phrase, “Patrick Mahomes is giving back money to the Chiefs”?

His $58 million cap hit in 2024 is not crippling, but it will likely force them to lose Chris Jones. If they restructure his deal to save money, Mahomes will make over $70 million per season from 2025-2026 and that could be crippling. Okay, that’s his right and he’s earned it.

What I’m saying is that this is only a true copycat league if Mahomes decides to chase rings over money and winning eight Super Bowls would still make Patrick Mahomes—as it has done for Brady’s off-field and post-career earnings—A LOT of money. More than the $10-$20 million per year he could give back if he wanted to so that Kansas City could make the rest of the team around him better.

It’s a copycat league…up until you ask someone how much they’d be willing to sacrifice to win a Super Bowl. Then it’s a dog-eat-dog league.

But that’s not the subject of today’s bonus article for Regular Joes, although what I am going to breakdown is another quarterback-related strategy that seems to be working across the NFL for those teams that do it and for some reason completely ignored by everyone else. It benefitted all four quarterbacks in the conference championship games this year:

Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, Brock Purdy, and Jared Goff have this one thing in common.

If the Seahawks draft a quarterback, even if they have some extreme move like trading up for Caleb Williams or someone else, they should do it too: