Purdy: Most Valuable Player Compared to Salary

“Most Valuable Player” is kind of a weird name for an award, isn’t it?

There’s no reason the NFL needs to call its biggest award that. We could be talking about the most outstanding player in the league or the most important player or the most useful player or the most exceptional player. We could be handing out the Joseph F. Carr Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence for that matter. If the award was named differently, maybe it would be more likely that the likes of Tyreek Hill or Christian McCaffrey could win.

But no, tradition says we call it the most valuable player, and tradition further says that we don’t explicitly define that. Each voter decides what that means themselves, and we’ve come to a general consensus. Positional importance matters: quarterbacks impact the game more than, say, long snappers. Team success matters: voters are more likely to pick a player off of the top seed in the conference than a team that stays home in January. Style points matter: it’s not just who has the best numbers, and having big, flashy victories and creating highlight-reel plays can help sway votes. We’ve reached a fairly comfortable consensus, at least, on the kind of thing we’re looking for.

What no one is looking for, though, is a literal definition of value. The NFL has a hard salary cap, no matter what Mickey Loomis tries to tell you as he shunts another $50 million to be paid by his great-grandchildren. Every dollar you spend at a position is one you can’t use elsewhere, and finding players who outperform their contracts is an important part of building a quality team. If it were really the most valuable player, then it would go the best quarterback still on his rookie contract every year.

So let’s set aside Dak Prescott and Lamar Jackson and Jalen Hurts, all of whom are very legitimate MVP candidates, and talk about the guy who has to split a room in Santa Clara. Brock Purdy leads the league in passing DYAR and passing DVOA, and yet is 66th in cap hits among quarterbacks at just $889,253. He has a lower cap hit than both of his backups in San Francisco. He has a lower cap number than either Jimmy Garoppolo or Trey Lance, the guys he replaced. He has a lower cap hit than Clayton Tune or Brian Hoyer or most of the other disastrous spot starters the league has trotted out this year. He has a low enough cap hit that the $253 at the end of it is relevant. And that low cap hit has allowed Kyle Shanahan and the 49ers to surround him with prime cuts at every skill position and throughout his defense.

None of that should matter one iota for MVP, mind you; voters correctly throw that out the window when making their decisions. But it is relevant. Part of the reason San Francisco has been so successful is having a quarterback on a cheap contract, even by rookie standards. So the question has been raised – is the 49ers starting quarterback the best value-for-money quarterback in DVOA history? To find out, we need to develop an important and not-at-all goofy statistic: Price Units Relative to DYar, or PURDY.

Calculating a player’s PURDY is a straightforward progress. You take a quarterback’s total DYAR – passing and rushing – and divide it by his cap hit. For the purposes of comparing PURDYs between seasons, we’re technically dividing it by the cap hit percentage rather than the raw numbers, but the principle is the same.

At the moment, Brock Purdy has 1,470 passing DYAR and 45 rushing DYAR, for a total of 1,514. His cap hit is $889,253, while the salary cap this season was set at $224.8 million. Therefore, Purdy’s cap hit was 0.396% of the cap this season. Divide 1,514 by 0.396, and you get 3,828 – Purdy’s 2023 PURDY.

That sure is a four-digit number we’ve listed there. Without context, though, it’s meaningless. To figure out just how good that is, let’s run a leaderboard. Here are the 12 PURDYist players in the league in 2023:

We’ve listed 12 players here, rather than 10, because we have two names who haven’t qualified for the leaderboards just yet. Jake Browning would be 20th in passing DYAR had he hit the 200 attempts mark, and since DYAR is a counting stat, I think it’s more than fair to be impressed by the hot start to his career. His first start against Jacksonville had -29 DYAR and essentially canceled out his performance off the bench against Baltimore, but he’s had back-to-back triple-digit DYAR days as he’s driven Cincinnati back into contention. Trevor Lawrence, Justin Herbert and Lamar Jackson, just to name three quarterbacks, haven’t put together back-to-back triple-digit DYAR days yet. Not bad for a UDFA who had never seen the field before this season.

Joe Flacco is a different case; he’s here because he’s getting paid peanuts. Because he was signed off the couch in November, he’s just getting a prorated portion of his salary. Technically, his deal is a practice squad deal for $370,800, the maximum amount a practice squad player could get. Flacco isn’t signed to the main roster yet, despite being Cleveland’s starting quarterback; that will likely happen after this week for procedural reasons. That will affect his cap hit and, in turn, his PURDY. Still, pretty great story that Flacco has come off the couch and played well!

And speaking of Cleveland quarterbacks, Baker Mayfield is the other bargain-basement name on this year’s leaderboards. It’s hard to say he’s having a career renaissance considering how middling Tampa Bay is overall, but credit where credit is due – I did not have Mayfield in the top 20 in DYAR and DVOA before the season began. Mayfield hasn’t hit triple-digit DYAR for a season since 2020, so while this year hasn’t been up to the standards of his best seasons with the Browns, it’s been a nice little rebound. And because he’s playing like a below-average but above-replacement player, the Bucs are in first place in the NFC South. There are worse things to be.

The rest of the list features an interesting mix of names. C.J. Stroud is here for what is likely his first of many appearances while his rookie deal ticks on. Justin Herbert might be here for the last time, as his deal balloons from $8.5 million to $19.3 million next season; the Chargers really have wasted the financial benefits caused by having Herbert on a rookie deal. Jordan Love has been up and down, but more up than down in recent weeks. Jalen Hurts hasn’t quite matched last year’s numbers but is still one of the most cost-effective quarterbacks in the game, making less than Stroud is this season. And Josh Allen makes an appearance on this list just before his cap hit balloons from $18.6 million this season to $47 million next year.

Still, they all pale to Purdy’s four-digit total. More than quadrupling your nearest competitor is an impressive feat, no matter what the statistic is. So the next question is – who is the PURDYist quarterback of all time?

Well, we can figure that out, too, but we need to add a couple caveats. First, “all time” stretches all the way back to 1994, because that’s when the salary cap was first put into play – since we’re measuring players relative to their cap hits, we can’t go back to the beginning of DYAR in 1981. Secondly, we’re going to exclude anyone who didn’t reach the minimum pass threshold in that season, just to avoid any Flaccos popping into our data. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the race for most PURDY of all time and…

…you’ve got to be kidding me.

That’s right, it’s another Dak Prescott vs. Brock Purdy debate! The only passer in NFL history to put up as much value per cap dollar spent as Purdy this season was fourth-round rookie Prescott. Like Purdy, Prescott was an impressive third-string player in camp who got elevated to the starting role because of injuries to both the starter (Tony Romo) and the backup (Kellen Moore). Unlike Purdy, Prescott got to play the entire season because those injuries happened in preseason. All Prescott did with the opportunity was finish third in DVOA and fourth in DYAR, setting the rookie record in the latter.

Being a late draft pick is great for your chances to appear on this table. Russell Wilson is second all-time in rookie quarterback DYAR (including rushing value), and he shows up twice in the top 10, along with two hits from Prescott and one from Purdy. Kirk Cousins was famously taken as a backup option in the same draft that saw Washington draft Robert Griffin second overall; Cousins; superior health has kept him performing to this day. Nick Foles, too, was a third-round pick, and while his DYAR success was more fleeting, his 2013 season saw him make the Pro Bowl and lead the league in passer rating, accomplishments I’m sure he puts in equal esteem with, you know, the whole Super Bowl thing five years later.

The only names on this list who didn’t come from the draft came from Canada, which used to be a major exporter in cheap quality quarterbacks. Jeff Garcia was considered too small at 6-foot-1, 195 pounds to play in the NFL, so he honed his craft with the Calgary Stampeders for five seasons, winning a Grey Cup before signing on to be a backup to Steve Young in 1999. Well, Young got hurt in Week 3, Garcia eventually took over, and made three consecutive Pro Bowls before breaking $1 million in a season. And then there’s Doug Flutie, who bounced from the USFL to the NFL to the CFL and back again. It was the CFL where he had the most success – a three-time Grey Cup champion and six-time Most Outstanding Player. He rode that success back into the league and into Buffalo, where he had his two most successful seasons in the NFL before being inexplicably benched for Rob Johnson in the 1999 playoffs. 

So, teams should try to find a Day 3 quarterback in the draft or, failing that, travel north and back in time. Great plan. What about teams who can’t do any of those things? Let’s take a look at the leaderboard once again, but this time excluding anyone in their first four seasons. No rookie deals here!

Yes, Kurt Warner’s 1999 debut doesn’t count as a rookie year. Warner spent what would have been his rookie season (1994) stocking shelves at a Hy-Vee in Cedar Falls. He spent his second-through-fourth seasons in the Arena League with the Iowa Barnstormers. And then he spent his fifth season in Europe with the Amsterdam Admirals. I still was surprised he didn’t make the all-time top 10, as his UDFA to MVP story is firmly carved into NFL legend. He falls short, because the Rams gave him a $500,000 roster bonus after the season – basically all the money they had left under the cap, as a thank you for, well, everything. If you just go by the $250,000 he actually made during 1999 proper, his PURDY would jump to 3,731. I sure hope that extra half a million dollars eases the sting of not being on top of an arbitrary leaderboard a quarter of a century later, Kurt.

The other notable thing about the names on this list, other than their general lesser quality compared to the all-time leaderboard, is just how many of them played in Minnesota. Both the Vikings and 49ers show up three times, but it’s Garcia every time for San Francisco. The Vikings get 1999 Jeff George – Aaron Schatz talked about him briefly in Quick Reads this week – 2004 Daunte Culpepper and 2017 Case Keenum. Keenum is obviously the biggest fluke on the list; he had 1,369 DYAR in 2017 and -242 for the rest of his career. Culpepper had had one solid season in 2000, but 2004 was over 300 DYAR more than he had ever put up before. Or, for that matter, than he ever put up again – he blew out his knee in 2005 and never came close to replicating that season. George did replicate his quality of play, but he didn’t do it in Minnesota – George, who made a habit of burning bridges, never spent more than four years with any one team despite starting double-digit games for four different franchises.

If there’s anything actionable on this table, it’s Ryan Tannehill in the tenth slot. Tannehill’s cap hit was so low in 2019 because he was coming off four straight down seasons and a torn ACL. Tennessee got him on the cheap as he looked to rehab his career, and the change of scenery did him wonders. He won Comeback Player of the Year that season. The lesson there is that it’s good to take a cheap risk on players who have been good in the past, especially if injuries explain some of their downturn. The other lesson is then don’t go on to give that player a massive extension off the back of one season, but I suppose that’s a tale for another day.