Saunders: Yes, T.J. Watt is Worth $40 Million Per Year
The Pittsburgh Steelers are going to pay outside linebacker T.J. Watt around $40 million per year on a new contract this offseason, and that should be surprising to absolutely no one. It certainly won’t be to the Steelers.
For whatever reason, the idea of paying an edge rusher that amount of money has some Steelers fans up in arms — even to the point of suggesting the absolutely insane idea of trading one of the best defensive players in all of football. We’ll get there in a second.
Let’s start with the salary.
Yes, Watt is worth $40 million. So was Myles Garrett. It sounds like a like a lot of money. It really isn’t. Your brains just haven’t adjusted for NFL inflation.
In 2021, Watt signed a five-year, $112 million contract with an average annual value of just over $28 million. In 2021, the NFL salary cap was $182.5 million. Watt’s AAV was just over 15% of the salary cap.
In 2023, Nick Bosa signed a six-year, $170 million contract with an average annual value of $34 million. In 2023, the NFL salary cap was $224.8 million. Bosa’s AAV was again just over 15% of the salary cap.
Garrett’s new deal is a four-year, $160 million contract with an average annual value of $40 million. The current NFL salary cap is $279.2 million. Cleveland is getting Garrett for 14.3% of the salary cap.
The contract the Browns signed Garrett to isn’t some kind of massive jump from before. If anything, it’s a bargain. And it’s right in the line with the rest of the market. Danielle Hunter and Maxx Crosby — players nowhere near the caliber of Garrett, Bosa and Watt — both signed for AAVs over $35 million this offseason.
No one I’ve talked to in football has been surprised at the contract amount Garrett got, and the expectation is that Watt will be right alongside him. If Micah Parsons gets a new deal, it’ll probably be for more.
If the Steelers just took Watt’s previous deal and repeated while factoring in the inflation of the salary cap, he’d be worth almost $43 million per season.
Yes, Watt is now 30 years old, and the length of the contract at that price might be an issue, but remember — he had his best season after signing that deal. The player the Steelers agreed to that last contract with had never been NFL Defensive Player of the Year and had was not the NFL co-leader in sacks per season. Watt’s 2023 season was better than all of the ones that had come before, as well.
So yes, he’s older — and has missed more time due to injury — but he’s also played better football than he ever had before that last deal.
Maybe the Steelers shouldn’t want Watt at $40 million per year for five years, given his age and recent injury history, but he’s certainly worth that sticker price. The Steelers certainly don’t have any sticker shock at the idea of paying $40 million per year for an edge rusher.
“I don’t expect salaries to go down,” general manager Omar Khan said at the owner’s meetings. “So I expect them to keep increasing year-to-year.”
Now, one could argue that, OK, maybe Watt is worth that, but he should not be worth it to a Steelers team that does not appear to be all that close to contending for a Super Bowl.
Simply put, such a trade cannot be won by the Steelers.
Draft picks are not reliable enough to ever accumulate enough of of them to recoup the value lost by trading Watt. Using the Pro Football Reference baseline approximate value stat AV, Watt has averaged 13.75 AV over his last four seasons. That includes the least-productive season of his career, when he was injured in 2022, along with the two best in 2021 and 2023.
One player in the entire 2024 NFL Draft class exceeded that average as a rookie — Jayden Daniels. No player in the entire 2023 NFL Draft class has exceeded that average over the last two years. Jahmyr Gibbs got close. No one from the 2022 NFL Draft class is even that close.
Even if you got a first-round pick for Watt, and you somehow were 100% certain that you were going to be able to use that pick to draft the best player in the entire draft class, that player would almost certainly be worth less to the Pittsburgh Steelers than having Watt.
Now, yes, the Steelers could use that money that they’d be spending on Watt and sign another free agent. Not now, obviously, but in 2026. It’s possible that they could end up on the plus side of the ledger.
But that’s assuming they’d get the best player in the draft. The average first-round draft pick is worth about 6-7 AV per season — less than half as much as Watt. That first-round pick is just as likely to never amount to any positive contributions at all as he is to be as good as Watt already is.
Simply put, unless the return is overwhelmingly lopsided — something like three first-round picks — trading star players for draft picks is a terrible way to go about running an NFL team.
That’s probably why no team has ever successfully executed such a rebuild since the Dallas Cowboys in the early 1990s. A team selling off its star players for draft capital is just as likely to spend a decade being bad as it is to rebound from successfully from that choice.
If the Steelers get offered a Herschel Walker-like return for Watt, fine. Anything less is a losing proposition.