Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers continues to be woefully underpaid. And the Packers continue to be seemingly on the verge of fixing that.
“We hope to soon have a contract extension,” Packers president Mark Murphy recently said regarding Rodgers, via WTMJ.com.
Rodgers surely hopes to have one, too. At $22 million per year, he has been leapfrogged in the last two years by the likes of Andrew Luck, Derek Carr, Matthew Stafford, Jimmy Garoppolo, Kirk Cousins, and Matt Ryan. The gap between arguably the best quarterback in the game and the highest paid quarterback in the game currently stands at $8 million per year.
The fact that a deal hasn’t been done sooner speaks to the challenge of coming up with a middle ground given that the Packers hold his rights for two more years at a very reasonable rate, and that they could then tag him twice. While there’s no reason to think the Packers will take a hard-line, you-signed-the-deal-now-deal-with-it approach, they could be reluctant to treat Rodgers like a guy who is on the open market, given that he’s four years away from getting there.
Then there’s the possibility that Rodgers will be looking for enhanced protections against other lesser quarterbacks getting more than him in the future, and that the Management Council surely won’t want the Packers to set a precedent that will be used by other players in the future.