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SAN FRANCISCO — Super Bowl LX marks the NFL’s first championship game without the Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes after playing in five of the last six (winning three), as the Seahawks and Patriots prepare to face off with quarterbacks whose salaries ranked 18th (Sam Darnold, $33.5 million) and 28th (Drake Maye, $9.1 million) in the league this season.
“You might imagine that any intense competitor is not used to sitting on the sidelines,” Leigh Steinberg, Mahomes’s agent, told Front Office Sports on Radio Row on Thursday.
Mahomes’s 10-year, $450 million contract, which was signed in 2020, still carries the highest total value in the NFL, but his $45 million average annual salary ranked 14th among quarterbacks in 2025. No. 1 is the Cowboys’ Dak Prescott at $60 million.
While Steinberg isn’t concerned with Mahomes’s contract ranking—“I’m going to let him speak to that,” he said—the longtime power agent predicts the overall numbers will continue to skyrocket. “We’ll inevitably see a 70 million–dollar quarterback,” he says. “And they’ve caught up for the first time to baseball and basketball, but the revenue is there to support it.
Franchise Quarterback Value
Steinberg knows a thing or two about quarterbacks—his former client list includes Pro Football Hall of Famers Troy Aikman, Steve Young, and Warren Moon, among others.
“The most critical position in football is a franchise quarterback, and let’s define that as someone that you can build a team around for 10 to 12 years,” Steinberg said. “Someone that you can win because of rather than with, and importantly, someone who, in adversity—thrown a couple interceptions, crowd is booing, game’s getting out of hand—can they focus, compartmentalize, adopt a quiet mind, and elevate their level of performance in those critical circumstances? And without that player, it’s impossible to win in pro football today, and so that’s why that one position has achieved this explosive compensation level.”
But Steinberg says those star signal callers are also only as good as a team’s salary cap situation allows them to be. “Are they playing on a team with enough cap room to be able to support their effort to get to the Super Bowl? So, it’s a balance.”
Winning Mentality
Given the NFL’s hard cap restraints, Steinberg says quarterbacks need to “realize the benefits of getting to the Super Bowl,” both on and off the field.
This weekend, Maye and Darnold have the opportunity to elevate their stardom with a victory in Super Bowl LX. “If they perform dramatically, after the game is over, they’ll transcend a new genre of hardcore sports fans, with the chance to become a household name,” Steinberg says. “They’ll be on the Today show, The Tonight Show, and People magazine. It’s the premier marketing event that we have in American sports.”
Staying humble as a young player is something Steinberg believes is paramount, too. “The key is to allow your career to develop ahead of all the marketing and the different distractions,” he says. “Mahomes didn’t do endorsements his first couple of years. Back in the days of Troy Aikman and Steve Young, they didn’t do endorsements in their early years. Then the best advice is stay in the process of developing the skills that make you the best player you can be, and the rest will take care of itself.”
Beyond Football
Outside of his sports agency work, Steinberg, 76, continues to be extremely public about his previous struggle with alcohol, including in the upcoming release of his book, The Comeback: A Playbook for Turning Life’s Setbacks into Victories.
“It was agonizing at the start because it was reliving days that in many ways you just as soon forget,” Steinberg says. “Most people experience some form of setback in their life. It could be financial, marital, relationships, health, or addiction. So, the question is: Once life has collapsed as you know it, is there a way to be resilient and come back and have a fulfilling life again? So The Comeback is tales of resilience.”
