Brissett signs 2 year $30 million extension

[Chaka]

Originally Posted by rm1369

I posted in another thread that it was likely the Colts would be forced to franchise Brissett next year. They were in a bad spot. Brissett is unproven, but also a young player with upside that they obviously like. Even a decent year would have forced the Colts to make a huge investment to keep him. QB money is simply insane. And they’d have to make that investment after 1 year basically. Instead they have given him a 2 year deal basically worth the equivalent of this years salary and the franchise tag next year. Why not just wait? Because of the escalator clause in the franchise tag. It gets significantly more expensive each time you are forced to use it. They now have him locked up for three years (next two plus one franchise year) at a cost they can manage to decide what they have and how to move forward. And they did it in a way that built goodwill with the player and maintained their long term flexibility. To me you are looking at this wrong - this deal likely saved the Colts money long term. The only way it is bad is if Brissett completely fails. Even if he is mediocre it still works out for them IMO. It was a good move by Ballard who was placed in a bad situation.

Yes, the Colts obviously like him, and that's the one thing that helps me understand this deal. Not sure I agree with your franchise tag rationale, as Spaceman pointed out, the QB franchise tag is only $25m. It will go up by next year, but probably not significantly above the $28 million we paid to Brissett under this deal. Yes, I suppose it's a "free" franchise tag in a sense, so we wouldn't start the escalations for the following year, but was the cost worth it?

I'm a big Ballard fan, no question, but deals like this aren't my thing. To me, you reward performance, which is kinda what I thought Ballard was all about. So I would have been perfectly fine with letting Brissett prove himself, and then paying him a lot if he did - even more than the $28M if necessary. Outside of the draft, I'm not as much of a fan of paying a guy top dollar before he's done anything to merit it.