Let's make one thing crystal clear: Joe Burrow will not be signing a contract that's anything less than the biggest contract in NFL history.

What will make it the biggest contract in NFL history is the Average Annual Value (AAV). The current mark to beat right now is $52 million, which is what Lamar Jackson signed for two weeks ago. Jackson beat out Jalen Hurts' $51 million AAV deal from earlier in the offseason.

Former All-Pro and future Hall of Fame tight end Rob Gronkowski should be taking notes on this.

In an interview with Fanduel TV's Kay Adams, Gronkowski spoke on why Burrow should follow in the footsteps of his former teammate, Tom Brady, and take a slightly smaller contract with the Bengals in order to prioritize the team being good enough to compete for Super Bowls. 

"I believe that will set him up to be in Super Bowl contention every single year," Gronkowski said. "He wants good teammates around him, and that's a great thing. … What's the difference between $47-48 million or $53-54 million when the next highest guy on your team's only getting paid in the 20s? There's already that big of a difference between your pay and the next highest-paid guy on your team. So who cares?

"I'm waiting for a quarterback to do that, kinda go down the Brady route."

Gronk will have to wait a long time for a quarterback to do that, considering not a single one has done so since Brady did it for years. Brady in many ways is an outlier of the highest resort, and having an ex-wife who made hundreds of millions in her profession certainly helped Brady agree to taking less.

Seriously, if this is such a doable strategy for quarterbacks like Burrow to take, why hasn't a single one went down this path? Many point to Patrick Mahomes being another exception, but the $45 million AAV he agreed to back in 2020 was the largest figure for a quarterback at the time. The sheer length of the 10-year deal has just made the Kansas City Chiefs immensely more flexible since agreeing to the deal. 

Dak Prescott, Josh Allen, Deshaun Watson, Kyler Murray, Russell Wilson, Hurts, and Jackson have all one-upped each other in recent years, constantly resetting the market of the most valuable position in American sports.

Why on God's green earth would, or should, Burrow be any different? 

If it's because of the salary cap, then that's rooted in misconceptions as well. Not only does a player not have to take less cash than he's worth in order to make the deal fit nicely on the cap, it's not the player's responsibility to do so in the first place. The onus falls directly on the people responsible for being cap-compliant, aka the Bengals' front office.

Take a note from NFL analyst Andrew Brandt's recent article: Cash is real money, cap is just the accounting of it. A player taking a smaller AAV is not the only way, or the correct way for that matter, to provide his team with greater cap flexibility. That comes with re-structuring deals and turning salaries into signing bonuses.

"Taking less cash only hurts the player and helps the owner, who is paying less than he should. NFL owners all have assets worth over $2 billion; they do not need players to sacrifice any cash in their contracts. It is quite enough for players to help the team to provide more cap; they certainly do not provide them more cash." – Brandt on salary cap myths

But what if the Bengals don't want to play in that sandbox where they're kicking the can down the road. Well, they can always add a provision in the contract that automatically converts Burrow's salary into a signing bonus if they fall under a certain amount of cap space, as salary cap expert Andre Perrotta pointed out:

A clause including automatic base to signing bonus conversion in the event the Bengals ever have less then "x" Cap Space (say, < $10M Cap) by "y" date (say, the first day of each League Year)

This is where structure and creative contract language/drafting can benefit both sides.

— Andre Perrotta (@andreperrotta13) May 17, 2023

There is a very real future where the Bengals pay Burrow the right amount of cash that he's worth as the next quarterback to get paid, and still have the cap space to surround him with the talent he needs to win Super Bowls.

Gronkowski, and the rest of those interested in Burrow's future, should take note of that.