Patrick Mahomes signed a 10-year extension with the Chiefs, ensuring that he will spend most, if not all, of his career in Kansas City.
Former sports agent Joel Corry, however, has mixed feelings about the deal.
“I hope there’s something unique in the contract that we haven’t seen to make doing a 10-year extension worth his while,” Corry said on After Hours with Amy Lawrence. “It actually does contain something you typically don’t see in an NFL contract. Typically when you have a really long deal . . . once you get past the first three or four years, then it becomes basically a series of team options and the team can get rid of you whenever they want when it best suits them. In Mahomes’ case, he’s got the majority of his money in March roster bonuses when the league year starts.”
As Corry explained, those roster bonuses become guaranteed a year early.
“So in 2027, he’s got a $49.4 million roster bonus. It becomes fully guaranteed on the third day of the 2026 year,” Corry said. “That continues throughout the rest of the contract. So it’s going to be tough for him not to see the majority of this deal, just because of the way the guarantees vest early. But that being said, if he was really going to try to maximize his income throughout his whole career, he wouldn’t have signed a 10-year deal.”
There are two reasons for not signing a deal that long: TV contracts and gambling.
“I’ve never seen TV deals go down,” Corry said. “Typically they go up by a huge percentage. And everyone is anticipating that the gambling revenue is going to be a big piece of the pie, and he’s locked himself in for so long without these two variables being defined. If they do become big revenue pieces, then he’s not going to reap the benefit of that. If I was going to do a deal this long – and I wouldn’t have – I would have some way for him to void out of the deal at some point so that he could reap the benefit of the changing financial landscape, which will happen.”
Mahomes, though, might be less concerned about money and more concerned about Super Bowls.
“I think what Mahomes is trying to do is try to catch Tom Brady,” Corry said. “Brady started taking discounts in 2013, 2014, which gave New England a chance to amass more talent. I think this is maybe Mahomes’ way of trying to do the same thing, but also trying to get the best of both worlds where he gets a big contract and security for the bulk of his career.”