Whoever needed to hear Sean McVay just plain didn’t. I’m not sure if it was Matthew Stafford and his agent, or Les Snead and the other front office folks for the Los Angeles Rams—but neither side heard. At worst, neither listened the plea of the franchise head coach who was so gutted by the heartbreaking, left-it-all-on-the-field end to the Rams’ 2024-25 season that he admitted to being in total shock after the game.
Here, however, is what he said of the Matthew Stafford contract situation at the end of January, just over a month ago:
We don’t want to have that go on again. I don’t think that’s good for anybody. I think sooner than later, being able to get that clarity. Understanding clear, open and honest communication. I think there’s a lot of love coming from our part. I think there’s a lot of appreciation coming from his part as well. And I think a lot sooner than later is an ideal scenario.
Now, the calendar is about to flip to March, folks are swarming to Indianapolis for the Combine, and the past few days, McVay is out there doing podcast runs telling everyone he wants Stafford to lead the team. It’s about as exasperating a situation as I can imagine for both McVay and Stafford, whose hit-it-off-so-quick-they-moved-Stafford-in-the-next-day trip to Cabo is stuff of Rams yore.
In 2020, that was kept quiet. 2024’s fracturing of the Super Bowl LVI Rams era has been anything but.
What’s going on between Stafford and the Rams?
Quick timeline of events:
- January 19th, 2024: Rams lose to the Eagles in the NFC Divisional Round. Stafford tells reporters he’ll take a beat to think about his future, but thought he played well this year, and intends to return next year.
- February 3rd, 2025: Cooper Kupp announces on social media that the Rams are hoping to trade him immediately.
- February 6th, 2025: Stafford’s wife, Kelly, expresses frustration with the Rams’ intent to trade Kupp on her podcast. She suggests that Stafford is unhappy, too, and potentially provides subtext that Stafford was willing to work with the Rams financially to keep both he and Kupp.
- February 22nd, 2025: Rams give Stafford’s agent, Jimmy Sexton, permission to speak to other teams to get a better sense of Stafford’s market valuation.
- February 24th, 2025: Reports flow in that Stafford is looking for a contract in the ballpark of $50 million per year, over double what he made last year for the Los Angeles Rams
- February 26th, 2025: Front office executives begin to arrive in Indianapolis for the 2025 NFL Combine. The Rams let the Pittsburgh Steelers know that a resolution on Stafford’s contract situation will likely be resolved during the early days of the Combine, but will certainly be resolved by the end of the league year on March 12, 2025.
The contract bungle
A bit of a deep dive, as explained by Joel Corry of CBS Sports:
Instead of fully exploiting his substantial contract leverage, Stafford made a conscious decision to voluntarily leave money on the table in a deal that tied him with Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott as the league’s fourth-highest-paid player upon signing at $40 million per year. His four-year, $160 million contract extension contained $135 million in guarantees where only $63 million was fully guaranteed at signing.
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It would be an entirely different dynamic than Stafford is facing if he had driven a hard bargain in the 2022 negotiations. The current contract drama between Stafford and the Rams wouldn’t exist.
Assuming the cash-flow percentages of the 2022 extension, which are strong, would have been replicated in a $50.5 million-per-year deal, Stafford wouldn’t have a good justification to demand more money. Having 41.25% and 60.63% of the new money through the second and third new contract years would essentially equate to $122.5 million and $163 million at these respective junctures of the deal.
Averaging $54,333,333 per year through the first three new contract years, which run through 2025, would have put Stafford on par with Tagovailoa. Stafford would be ahead of Herbert, Jackson and Hurts, who are at $53,333,333, $52 million and $51 million per year after the first three new contract years.
Since Stafford is considered a top-10 quarterback, releasing or trading him wouldn’t have been a realistic way to contend with a 2025 salary cap number that probably would have been in excess of $60 million. Trading Stafford would have required him waiving his no-trade clause anyway. Carrying Stafford at such an exorbitant cap number or restructuring Stafford’s contract for cap purposes would have been the most likely course of action.
The bottom line: Stafford’s decision to take a hometown discount in 2022 created an ungainly year-to-year contract structure that’s put him at a severe disparity now between what he was paid in 2024 and what he wants to be paid in 2025.
Most-likely landing spots for Stafford in 2025
Los Angeles Rams
There’s not much to analyze here, other than that the ugly truth of it all is that Stafford might be having buyer’s remorse—or, rather, charityman’s remorse?—for supplanting himself firmly within the the awkward structural morass into which year-to-year, hometown-discount-based contracts can devolve for both player and organization. It’s been a patchwork operation for years now, and Stafford’s looking to cash in big on the last leg.
Sure, the Rams would get a look at their future and save a boatload of 2025 cap space if they managed to offload him. But Stafford knows the offense too well; he is the offense. Is a team that was more-or-less two plays away from the NFC Championship really about to blow it all the way up? It’d be bold in a way that’s not beyond the scope of what I believe Snead and McVay might do, but I just don’t think either of them believe in the free agent nor incoming quarterback class to make anything savvy happen. Not with this incoming quarterback class; not with Sam Darnold as your second-best free agent option. Second-best, of course, to the guy who carried you in the playoffs just six weeks ago, and won you a Super Bowl this calendar decade.
So, okay. I’ll just say it, because we’re all thinking it: The Rams don’t want to let Matthew Stafford walk. They can’t be hoping for that. But there’s certainly a bit of a performative element to this whole thing. Frankly, Cooper Kupp started it, and with good reason. Kelly Stafford stoked it. Zealous Giants fans on social media carried the torch the rest of the way. The Rams don’t want to be bullied, and so they’re letting things get a little messy.
But the only way Stafford doesn’t end up back in Los Angeles is if they’re Nico-Harrison-ing a trade for a quarterback of the future in the shadows that’ll shock the world in the coming weeks. Stafford remains the keystone to Rams’ 2025 curb appeal, when it comes to championship hopes. That defense is the future.
It might be a little awkward back in the building at first. This whole thing has been. The business of football is, too, whenever it comes to what a player means to an organization intangibly. But Stafford is a professional.
Pittsburgh Steelers
The most ready-made roster of them all. Is Stafford ready for all that George Pickens in what might be his final year as an NFL quarterback? It’d be an offensive diva the likes of which Stafford has never seen.
But that defense is precisely what the Rams are trying to build—and, dare I say, improve upon—with their young core of Verse, Fiske, Turner, Durant, etc. The Steelers already have that, a bag of chips, and T.J. Watt. They’ve got a special teams unit full of vipers. And there’s some blue-blood appeal, too; some undeniably talented, if a bit raw or ceiling-capped, offensive weapons.
But this is no breeze of a division, and the locker room seemed to fracture easily last year once the offensive identity of the Steelers took a downturn around Week 10 of the 2024 season. Stafford would be walking into easily the most historically-stable coaching situation in the NFL, but would it really be more stable than his current situation with McVay and the Rams? I just can’t imagine Arthur Smith and Matthew Stafford gelling, philosophically.
Did I mention how brutal a division this is? For a quarterback who just spent the first half of last season behind an offensive line with the pushback of a soft breeze? Are we really taking the Stafford family wagon to steel-gray Pittsburgh, Matthew?
Perhaps. The Steelers are interested in Stafford, so much so that they were at the center of the most recent public iteration of this saga. Just earlier today, the Rams gave the Steelers a sense of the timeline by which when all this will be solved. At the very least, this means the Steelers remain closely in the running, or did so until earlier this evening.
New York Giants
Good luck on this one. And good grief if it happens. Good riddance if it goes south. Etc.
Everyone’s linking the assistant coach/brother-in-law hire as the inciting incident behind these rumors. Some believe Malik Nabers’ tweet after Cooper Kupp announced the Rams’ intention to trade him was a lobbying tactic to get Stafford to Big Blue. Daboll is a quarterback coach, or at least got his chops with that reputation. I’d hesitate to say he’s a career one, as of yet.
What’s the upside, here? Listen, for all the ballyhoo, it’s important we keep some perspective. This isn’t an Aaron Rodgers situation, whereby you’ve got an aging quarterback with one good year left in him who’ll disappear into a mud-hut somewhere equatorial and buggy to choose his suitor. There likely shouldn’t be the degree of speculation surrounding Stafford’s situation as there was Rodgers’ in 2023. But Stafford is the biggest name on the free agent market, and, for whatever reason, the Rams aren’t yet committing to paying him. And so the loudest folks in the room—hello, New York Giants—make some noise, and a baseless rumor gains traction.
Do we believe that family-man Stafford is now going to take the fattest check and transplant his family to the Meadowlands, where he’ll lose ten games and take a beating behind a bad offensive line and lose his love for the game? It’s not the consideration when it comes to where Stafford signs. All I’m saying is: whereas Rodgers and some of the younger quarterbacks didn’t necessarily weigh such considerations as paramount, Stafford will. He has to.
On the football side: the roster, comparatively, stinks. The offensive weapons are middling, except for the superstar-in-purgatory that is Malik Nabers. Tyrone Tracy is sure interesting. But, gosh—the men protecting the New York quarterback are, as a collective, an insult to the idea of a professional unit in any capacity, let alone that of an offensive line in the NFL. It’d be a bloodbath, an unnecessarily ugly ending to an otherwise remarkably-sterling career. Too many spotlights for such a reserved and deferent leader.
Bottom line
Criticize the platform, source, behavior—whatever—if you must, but Kelly Stafford’s comment on her podcast that Stafford wasn’t “trying to put the team in a bad situation” was code for: this man was going to take a hometown discount when Cooper Kupp was in the picture, don’t you all see? And I do believe that’s an important, material nugget of information into Stafford & co.’s approach to testing the market. As of right now, we have every reason to believe that the $50 million valuation is also contingent upon moving to a team with a ready-made roster.
That rules out the Giants. It makes the Steelers a little bit more interesting, but not enough, especially when you consider the AFC North more broadly. And, for the record, I think that dinner with Brady in Las Vegas was more a leveraging technique than anything. Brady’s known for helping his fellow players get paid. How many incentives did he throw (literally) Gronk’s way?
It’s clear, here. The Rams let Kupp go in ignominious fashion. They’ve been noncommittal to Stafford in contract construction, and he made the mistake in taking a hometown discount in 2022. The Rams just need to fatten Stafford’s bag, and he’ll be a Ram before the Ides of March.
