Tilis started first by looking at baseball contracts, mostly
Tilis started first by looking at baseball contracts, mostly
they’re longer by nature, and the ideas might resonate with the son of a baseball player. He called NBA teams, too. And in doing so, the Chiefs started to shape a vision they’d eventually present to Mahomes—one that would be founded on, yes, first, paying him his worth, and at the same time allowing for the team to plan to build around him for years and years to come.
It was going to be positioned, as the Chiefs saw it, as a partnership between player and team, more so than any deal the franchise had ever done before.
“And [Cabott] has been on the partnership thing since we drafted Pat,” Tilis says. “It’s definitely a partnership, and Pat and Chris really wanted a guaranteed contract. We couldn’t do that. What we could do was what we ended up with, which is we’ll just guarantee everything a year out. And they followed the math and the cap numbers and the cash numbers and all that, and it was like, How are we ever going to be able to cut this guy?
“So, I mean, it’s practically over $400 million guaranteed.”
Before they’d get there, Mahomes justified about every dollar the Chiefs could dream of spending on him—by winning league MVP in his first year as a starter, and then the Super Bowl in his second, just as he was becoming eligible to do the deal.
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