Inside The Reworked Contract Keeping Mac Jones In San Francisco For One More Year
San Francisco secures its insurance policy with a sweetened deal, but league-wide skepticism regarding the "Shanahan effect" has cooled the market for the former first-round selection.
Video Transcript
Relationship between a front office and a backup quarterback in the NFL is one of the most delicate balancing acts in professional sports.
San Francisco 49ers and signal caller Mac Jones have a fascinating resolution to this dynamic.
The 49ers and Jones agreed to a revised contract for the upcoming campaign.
The updated deal rewarded the twenty-seven-year-old with a three hundred thousand roster bonus, bumping his total compensation to three point five five mil for the final year of his contract, with an additional two point two five million dangling in reachable performance incentives.
On the surface, the sweetening of the deal signals that general manager John Lynch and head coach Kyle Shanahan are thrilled about their insurance policy.
But beneath the financial harmony lies a harsher truth about how the rest of the NFL views the former first-round pick.
Despite an intense off-season speculation that San Francisco would flip Jones after a highly efficient stretch of games last year, but a trade market never materialized.
The 49ers reportedly set a high asking price, and rival front offices completely kept their distance.
Appearing on his YouTube channel, NBC Sports Bay Area anchor Matt MacYauch pulled back the curtain on why the league's executives refused to surrender a day two or three draft selection for Brock Purdy's primary backup.
He said, "In talking to people around the league, the reason I think there wasn't the trade market a lot of people expected for Max Jones this off-season is because there's a belief that he was successful because being in Kyle Shanahan's system and because of Kyle Shanahan's play calling and everything else."
He even shared a blunt quote from an anonymous league source who sarcastically asked the team if trading for the quarterback would also mean bringing Kyle Shanahan with him.
Rival teams were terrified of paying a high price tag for Jones.
Surrendering a second or third-round pick for a player with a limited starting sample size is risky, but a trading team would also have been forced to immediately hand Jones a lucrative deal.
No front office was willing to exhaust that much draft and financial equity on a player whose success is supposedly widely credited to a coaching mastermind.
If Purdy stays entirely healthy, then Jones will spend the year collecting a nice paycheck from the sidelines, potentially positioning himself to sign another backup deal to stay in San Francisco.
If Purdy goes down, the 49ers know they have a highly capable signal caller who can preserve their championship window.
For a true Super Bowl contender, that peace of mind is worth every penny of his revised contract.
