There's a costly problem with the 49ers, Raiders' rebuilds

Thursday night's game between the Raiders and the 49ers in Santa Clara is perhaps the worst primetime game in the history of the NFL – a true Toilet Bowl between two teams with a combined two wins at the halfway point of the season.

This is so much a lost fall for Bay Area pro football – Jon Gruden is just about to be spectacularly rebuild the Raiders just before the start of the sea, and the 49ers, in the year of their rebuild, lost any chance of the moment Jimmy Garoppolo his ACL in Week 3.

And with both squads seemingly at rock-bottom, it's easy to imagine theoretically better times – to be skip ahead to 2019 and beyond.

But taking a look at the NFL and recent league history, I'm not sure that either of these teams will be competing for a Super Bowl anytime soon.

The reason: their quarterbacks.

I'm not trying to slam or hate on Garoppolo and Raiders' quarterback Derek Carr when I say that I do not know – at least to be a general talent.

They both have plenty of upside. And I think both can carry a team to wins.

Both quarterbacks are highly paid, too.

It's that last part that's problematic.

Do not get me wrong: Both Garoppolo and Carr get the money they are free agents. In fact, if you will play well going forward, those contracts will likely look like bargains, considering the ever-increasing salary cap.

But if you look at the best teams in the NFL over the last few years, you will not find many quarterbacks making top dollar.

Thanks to the rookie wage scale, implemented after the 2011 lockout, NFL roster building is just as much accounting as it is scouting. There's a model for success, there I would have been tired and proven – the Niners and Raiders do not appear to be following it.

There have been seven Super Bowl winners since the rookie wage scale was implemented for the 2011 NFL Draft. The last six Super Bowl winners have been teams that, consciously or not, understood how to use it.

Three of these Super Bowl-winning teams have been made by rookie contracts, making tens of millions less than their free-agent value.

The other three were won by two all-time great quarterbacks, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning, who were playing on below-market-rate contracts.

What 's more, it' s more interesting – and damning to the Niners and Raiders as we look forward – is that the losers in the Super Bowl also seemingly understood the paradigm that a quarterback can not be paid above market-value.

That was the past, though – the NFL is undergoing a spread-offense that will radically change the game as we know it.

But looking at the current landscape of the league, the model is holding strong. The NFL's four best teams this season – the Rams, Chiefs, Patriots, Saints – all adhere to the aforementioned guidelines.

Jared Goff has gone to the top of the charts, but he's the 168th highest-paid player in the NFL, he's a general manager. The Snead to add crazy talent to the roster this offseason and Todd Gurley to an extension.

Chiefs quarterback and MVP frontrunner Pat Mahomes' contract is even more ridiculous – it's worth two percent of the salary cap.

And just behind those two teams are two of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, who are making things that they could ask for, even at their advanced ages:

• Brady, arguably the greatest player of all time, is the 11th highest-paid player in the league.
• Drew Brees, the fifth-highest paid QB in the NFL

And this season's biggest disappointments? There's a trend there, too.

The Jaguars missed their chance to compete for a quarterback Blake Bortles was on his rookie deal. Now they're paying him 47 percent more than DeShaun Watson (who has the Texans in first place) and Mahomes, combined, and their defense's natural regression, they're out of the playoff picture.

The Vikings and Falcons both gave quarterbacks $ 30 million per year deals this past offseason – is it any surprise that it looks like both teams appear to have taken a step back?

The rookie wage scale is not going anywhere, and quarterbacks will be the highest-paid players in the sports, because a good quarterback can make a bad team good. We saw that with Carr in 2016 (he was on a rookie deal) and Garoppolo last year (we have a rookie deal).

But it takes more than that to win a Super Bowl.

To compete for titles – and what's the goal, is not it? If you have a rookie deal, you need to have a certain Hall of Fame signal caller.

(Conversations can be had about Ryan, whose Hall of Fame is very much locked in, and Manning's title with the Broncos, which was really won by Von Miller, who was a rookie deal, and a great defense.)

This season, Garoppolo has the highest salary cap of any player in the NFL and is third on that list. Those rankings will fall in the years to come, but the dam has been breached.

Perhaps the Niners and Raiders can build title-contending teams around those quarterbacks while having less pie to give out NFL teams – it's certainly not impossible.

After all, Shanahan was one hell of an offensive coach – he proved that in Atlanta in 2016, when he took a Ryan-led team to the Super Bowl (that's the outlier). It can be a good offensive coach as well, and it has five first-round picks in the next two drafts – that's plenty of cheap, talented labor to recreate the Broncos' model, if he makes the right selections.

Hey, maybe Gruden and Niners John Lynch general manager will turn into West Coast Belichicks, establishing themselves amoung the best in the league

But that's asking for a lot, across the board, no?

There's a reason that Aaron Rodgers, whose cap hit has consistently been in the top-10 of the league (save for this year), has only been to one of the Super Bowl (in an uncapped, pre-lockout season, no less) and Matt Stafford has played only three playoff games.

They're exceptional quarterbacks, but it's a lot more than a quarterback.

So really, the only question left to ask about the Niners and Raiders is this: Are Garoppolo and Carr going to the Hall of Fame?

They are both talented and have coaches who, in theory, can get the most out of them. Perhaps it's all-time-great.

But for the sake of both teams, it better.

Because the paychecks have already arrived.