Buffalo Rumblings
Josh Allen has been playing significantly below market and he needs a new deal this offseason.
Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen’s contract lasts through the 2028 season, but it is going to be completely rewritten this offseason. Allen signed in 2021, and since then the QB market has changed drastically. The most recent deal for Dak Prescott absolutely dwarfs Allen’s deal in every conceivable way, but it does provide a framework for what a new deal for Allen might look like.
Allen is set to make just $14.5 million in 2025. He is coming off a season in which he made $60 million, but that’s only because the two sides quietly renegotiated the contract last offseason. They took $25 million of his 2025 compensation and $5 million from 2028 to move into 2024. By moving such a large part of the 2025 compensation, they knew this offseason would be the time for a longer-term fix.
Prescott signed the biggest contract in NFL history in the fall of 2024. The four-year, $240 million contract didn’t have as much fully guaranteed money as Deshaun Watson’s contract, but it had a much higher yearly average and effectively guaranteed enough of the deal to make it incredibly strong for the player.
If you take the first five years of the Allen contract from 2021 to 2025, it’s $169.5 million total for an average of $33.9 million per year. In that same time frame, Prescott is going to make almost $100 million more than Allen with a grand total of $260 million, a $52 million per year average. Both QBs are in their prime playing on new deals, but Allen is being lapped financially.
Let’s first establish that the remainder of Josh Allen’s contract is four years and $130 million, so to get the current deal up to $60 million per year, they might announce it as a one-year extension worth $170 million while restructuring how the entire deal is paid. I would even go higher, say one year and $195 million, for an average of $65 million per season. That one-year extension would allow them to redistribute the money over five years including a big signing bonus in 2025.
Prescott’s signing bonus was $80 million, Jordan Love earned $75 million, Jared Goff $73 million, and Lamar Jackson $72.5 million. Because Allen has been so underpaid, it wouldn’t surprise me if Buffalo went higher than all of them up to $90 million. That would bring up his five-year compensation from 2021 to 2025 to $259.5, an average of $51.9 million and right in line with the Dak contracts from that same timeframe.
The five years then remaining on his deal from 2025 to 2029 would be a five-year, $325 million deal for an average of $65...
