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Tom Brady Makes Nearly $1.5 Million Per Hour of Playtime—Which Is Only a Fraction of the NFL’s Highest Paid Quarterbacks’ Earnings

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady during the AFC Wild Card Playoff game in January 2020.
New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady during the AFC Wild Card Playoff game in January 2020. | Elsa/Getty Images

Each week during football season, NFL quarterbacks face heaps of high-stakes pressure as millions tune in to watch them try to lead their teams to victory—or at least avoid getting blamed for bad passes. It’s by no means an easy job, but at least it pays well.

To find out just how well, AT&T affiliate All Home Connections analyzed the salaries and playing times of all the first-string quarterbacks from the 2018 NFL season. Even if you knew they were raking in piles of cash for every second they spent on the field, you might not have realized just how much.

If you’re looking for ways to justify despising Tom Brady, here’s one: He earns about $1.5 million for every hour of playtime. However, as any devoted New England Patriots fan will tell you, Brady is far from the highest-earning quarterback in the league, and he’s accepted lower base salaries throughout his career so the Patriots can use that extra money to build a championship-winning team around him.

When it comes to playtime earnings, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo beat Tom Brady and every other quarterback by millions—he landed in first place with an average of more than $27.6 million per hour on the field. Compared to Garoppolo, the $8.8 million of runner-up Aaron Rodgers practically seems like pocket change. Most of the other quarterbacks earn somewhere between $1 million and $4 million per hour of playtime.

Part of the reason it looks like Garoppolo out-earned his peers so spectacularly is because his total playtime for the 2018 season was much lower than everyone else’s, due to a knee injury he suffered during the third game of the season. For this study, All Home Connections added up each quarterback’s total number of snaps and multiplied it by their offense’s average seconds per play to estimate their overall playing time. Then, they divided that number by the quarterback’s 2018 salary. Since Garoppolo’s overall playing time was only about 1.5 hours, he got more buck for his bang. Brady, by comparison, clocked about 10 hours of playtime during 2018.

See the full breakdown here, and get ready for Super Bowl LIV with these fascinating Super Bowl facts.

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