NFL Players Who Were Massively Underpaid for What They Produced

by Jeremy Block - 10/12/2026

NFL players who were massively underpaid Wes Welker

Every contract in football is a bet on what comes next from a player, and teams rarely pay full price until a player proves it twice. Somebody breaks out, the front office waits to see whether it was real, and by the time the extension gets signed there is usually a season or two already in the books that nobody paid for.

MVP awards, rushing titles, and Super Bowl rings have all been won by players making a fraction of what their actual worth was. Either way, players were putting up numbers for years before anybody paid them the big bucks they deserved. Let’s check out six NFL players who were clearly underpaid for what they were bringing to the table.

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Lawrence Taylor (1986)

Two defensive players have won NFL MVP in the entire history of the award, and Lawrence Taylor is one of them. In the mid-80s there were several defenses that gave teams fits, and the Giants were near the top of that group, mostly because of Taylor himself.

It was the 1986 season where he set the tone, racking up 20.5 sacks, winning his third Defensive Player of the Year trophy, making first-team All-Pro, and closing it out with a Super Bowl ring. It was about as complete a resume as a defensive player can build in one year, and the Giants paid him $850,000 for all of it.

Keep in mind he was four years into a six-year extension worth $6.25 million. The deal seemed run-of-the-mill for a talented defensive player back in 1984, until two seasons later he put together an MVP season and made it look like the Giants had gotten him for dirt cheap. Nobody in upper management rushed to fix the contract either, and Taylor played out the rest of the deal making what a good starter makes, not what the best defensive player in football was worth.

Joe Montana (1988)

Two Super Bowl rings and two Super Bowl MVPs were already sitting on the shelf when Joe Montana entered the 1988 season, and with little surprise the 49ers went out and won another title that year, pushing the ring count to three. Yet for a quarterback who was the face of the franchise and considered the best the league had ever seen at the position, San Francisco had him down for just $1.1 million.

Getting drafted in the third round out of Notre Dame put him on a three-year deal worth $255,000, and the extensions he signed in 1982 and 1984 were fair enough for that era without ever matching what he was already doing on the field. He pulled in $900,000 in 1985 and $950,000 the season after that, numbers that were nowhere near what he meant to that team and looked more like a solid backup’s pay than a quarterback already holding two rings.

The offer that was long overdue finally arrived in 1990, with San Francisco handing him four years and $10 million at 34 years old, which finally put him around $4 million for that season, well after winning all four championships. Sometimes things are better late than never at all, and Montana’s payday was one of those.

Jerry Rice (1990)

Sharing a locker room with Joe Montana gave Jerry Rice a pretty clear picture of what the best player in football was worth, because Montana cleared $4 million in 1990 while Rice took home $900,000 that same season.

Any argument about what he deserved should have been settled back in 1987, when he scored 22 touchdowns in just 12 games, won Offensive Player of the Year, and landed on the NFL’s All-Decade team for the 1980s. Any football fan from that era would tell you Rice was the best receiver alive, and none of that translated when it came time for the 49ers to pay him.

Things did improve once the salary cap arrived, with a seven-year, $32 million deal in 1996 that finally put him where he belonged. The ending still wasn’t pretty, since San Francisco released him in June 2001 rather than pay the $4.1 million he was owed, and he signed with Oakland the next day for four years and $5.4 million.

Priest Holmes (2001)

Using a first-round pick on Jamal Lewis told Priest Holmes everything he needed to know about his future with the Baltimore Ravens, and at 27 years old he hit free agency with almost nobody bidding on him. The Kansas City Chiefs snagged him for $448,000, and nobody in that building had any idea what they were getting for that price.

Coming off a 588-yard, one-touchdown season in 2000, Holmes must have liked how he looked in a red uniform instead, because he went out and led the entire NFL in rushing that first year with the Chiefs. He came back in 2002 and did something nobody has matched since, piling up 2,287 total yards in just 14 games while taking home the scoring title and Offensive Player of the Year.

What did Kansas City give him for all that? A raise to $750,000, which barely acknowledged what he was doing on the field. The Chiefs found a first-team All-Pro running back on the discount rack and squeezed three straight years out of him before anybody made them pay what the position was actually worth.

James Harrison (2008)

Getting cut four separate times by the same franchise usually ends a career, but James Harrison kept coming back to the Steelers anyway, even taking a detour through NFL Europe because nobody wanted a linebacker listed at six feet. Anybody who actually watched him play figured out in a hurry that height was not the issue.

By 2008 Harrison had turned into one of the most feared defenders in football, leading the NFL in forced fumbles and becoming the only undrafted player ever to win Defensive Player of the Year. He finished the run off by picking Kurt Warner at the goal line in Super Bowl XLIII and taking it back 100 yards, which still stands as the longest interception return in Super Bowl history.

Pittsburgh waited until the following offseason to write the check that was long overdue, handing over six years and $51.175 million with $20 million guaranteed. The Steelers got a Defensive Player of the Year trophy and a Super Bowl ring out of him first, which is about as good a deal as a front office can hope to make.

Wes Welker (2011)

A second and a fifth-round pick is what it cost the Patriots to grab Wes Welker from the Dolphins in 2007, which had Miami thinking they just robbed New England in broad daylight. Most of the football world agreed, since Welker looked like an undersized slot receiver with decent hands and not much else, and that was far from the reality.

With the Dolphins, Welker was hardly even a receiver despite that being his listed position, mostly serving as a kick returner, and all of that changed once Tom Brady and head coach Bill Belichick saw what he could become. It became evident fairly quickly during his time in New England that defenses couldn’t stay with him on a 10-yard slant, and by 2011 he led the NFL with 122 receptions, 22 more than anyone else, finished second in receiving yards at 1,569, and did all of it for just a $2 million base salary. Talk about a steal.

New England slapped the franchise tag on him in 2012 instead of paying up, long-term talks went exactly as well as you would expect, and Welker ended up in Denver on a two-year, $12 million deal. Six seasons in New England, leading the league in catches three times, and the Patriots let him walk over spare change, then handed Danny Amendola five years for $31 million on the same day. Classic Belichick math.

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Start:	October 12, 2026 @ 10:30 PM
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NFL Players Who Were Massively Underpaid for What They Produced

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