Mayfield is ineffective and for $18 mill....? Shite.
Welcome to July. The Panthers are only going to pay $4.858M of Mayfield's salary.
That said, I'm not sure they're getting a bargain. I'm not even 100% sure Mayfield will be the starter for Carolina. It seems very likely, because as much as people overrate Mayfield around here, he hasn't been nearly as awful as Darnold, but I wouldn't make any bets on it at this point.
So I agree that it's
extremely unlikely that Mayfield would be worth his $18.9M cost for this year (something close to 40% of top-QB money), and NFL front offices appear to agree with us on that, because the best deal the Browns could get was for the acquiring team to give up the equivalent of a day-three pick in next year's draft (it's actually a fifth-round or fourth-round pick in the 2024 draft) and pay almost $4.86M in salary, that is, less than 10% of top-QB money. And because the Browns were unwilling to pay Mayfield more than $10.5M to play for some other team, Mayfield actually had to take a pay cut for even that deal to happen.
If any other NFL teams actually had interest in Mayfield, he wouldn't have accepted the pay cut, so even he appears to have accepted that NFL front offices just don't see him as a good QB.