The Justin Jefferson Deal Is Bigger Than You Think, And That's Cool

The deal the Vikings signed with Justin Jefferson looks like it's in line with the current receiver market. It's bigger than that. And that's fine.

Photo by Nic Antaya/Getty Images

If you haven’t heard the news, the Minnesota Vikings signed Justin Jefferson to an enormous deal worth $35 million a year, with a total value of $140 million.

More pointedly, the deal has $110 million guaranteed, a higher guaranteed total than any other receiver on the market by a substantial margin and the highest percentage guaranteed of a deal of any new-money, multi-year receiver deal worth $20 million per year or more.

The Jefferson contract is big — more than any non-quarterback in football — but larger than one might imagine going over the initial reported numbers.

On the surface, the deal does contain more average per year than any other non-quarterback, but that’s in the context of a higher cap number than many other big-money deals. Both Davante Adams and Tyreek Hill signed big contracts in 2022, for example, a year where the cap was 81 percent of where it is now.

Given the cap increase of 22.6 percent since that time, we should expect new-money contracts for top-of-the-market deals to be concurrently higher. And the average amount per year is just between those two receiver deals, taking up 13.7 percent of the current cap. Adams’ contract average value took up 13.5 percent of that year’s cap while Hill’s took up 14.4 percent.

That’s also less than Nick Bosa’s contract of $34 million per year, signed in 2023. Bosa, the previous leader in non-quarterback average salary, signed a deal whose average value took up 15.1 percent of the 2023 cap.

So, Why the Fuss?

If that’s the case, why should we be talking about how big the contract is instead of how reasonable it is?

Because he’ll actually be able to see it.

Jason Fitzgerald at OverTheCap looks at NFL contracts for a living and something stood out to him in his coverage of the contract: cash flow.

Look, I’m not going to do a better job than Jason on this point so check out his piece

Jefferson is going to receive much more money in the first three years of his deal than anyone else not playing quarterback. Aside from Bosa, it’s not particularly close.

That might be why the Tyreek Hill, Davante Adams and A.J. Brown numbers weren’t great guides for figuring out what Jefferson’s contract was going to look like — not because he didn’t exceed them in a way we understand but because all three of those receivers had inflated values in the back end of their contract that they were never going to see.

That’s not the case for Jefferson, who will definitively see $106 million deposited in his bank account barring an extraordinary circumstance like an early retirement or an arrest that invalidates his guarantees.

Hill, by contrast, only sees an average of $25 million over the first three years of the deal, with the numbers pushing the average up to $30 million coming in the fourth and fifth years of the contract, which are not guaranteed for injury or through any practical rolling trigger.

How Does This Compare?