When the current rookie wage scale first arrived in 2011, teams and agents began haggling over the number of four-year, first-round deals that would be fully guaranteed.<\/p>\n
Initially, roughly the first 20 players picked in round one got every penny guaranteed. Fifteen years later, that number has more than doubled.<\/p>\n
Based on the contracts negotiated to date following the 2026 draft, at least the first 48 players will have fully-guaranteed deals.<\/p>\n
The 48th overall pick \u2014 Falcons cornerback Aveion Terrell \u2014 received a fully-guaranteed deal. Last year, the fully-guaranteed contracts ended with Saints quarterback Tyler Shough, who was taken with the 40th overall selection.<\/p>\n
The 48th pick in 2025 had only 80 percent of his contract fully guaranteed.<\/p>\n
The 49th pick, Panthers defensive tackle Lee Hunter, is the highest-drafted player in 2026 to not have a fully-guaranteed deal. Of his total payout of $10.072 million, $9.507 million is fully guaranteed. That\u2019s 94.3 percent of the deal. (It\u2019s a significant bump from the 78.94 percent full guarantee for the player taken in that same slot in 2025.)<\/p>\n
Look for the trend to continue in 2027, with more of the players in round two getting fully-guaranteed deals. Already, the needle has moved to half of the second round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the current rookie wage scale first arrived in 2011, teams and agents began haggling over the number…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":656357,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-656356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/656357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}