Ninety Million Guaranteed Is The Only Target Projection I Trust

On Thursday the New Orleans Saints agreed to terms with Chris Olave on a four-year extension worth up to $132 million, with $90 million guaranteed. That works out to roughly $33 million a year at the top end, which slots him in beside his fellow 2022 draftees Drake London at $35 million and Garrett Wilson at $32.5 million.

Neighbors, most of you just read that and registered big number, good receiver, moving on. I would like to slow down on one word in it, because it is the only word in a contract that has ever told me anything useful about a fantasy season.

The Headline Number Is Marketing. The Guarantee Is Testimony.

Up to $132 million is a sentence constructed for a press release. It contains incentives, it contains years that may never be played, and it is designed to be screenshotted.

$90 million guaranteed is different, because guaranteed money is the only part of a contract a team cannot change its mind about. Everything else is a plan. The guarantee is a decision.

A team can say anything about a player in July. Only one number costs them something if they are lying.

And here is why that matters for your roster rather than your understanding of the salary cap. An organisation that has committed ninety million untouchable dollars to a wide receiver has, in the same motion, committed to finding out whether it was right. They do not pay that and then feed him five targets a week. The money is a usage forecast written in a language that is harder to fake than a coach quote.

Chief, every August you fall in love with a receiver on the basis of a training camp report written by a man watching from a folding chair. I am proposing we use the number the team was legally required to write down. One of these methods has a paper trail.

What He Did To Earn It

This is not a projection contract. Olave was entering the final year of his rookie deal and had been pushing for a long-term commitment before camp, and he arrived at that conversation holding a 2025 season of career highs across the board:

• 158 targets
• 100 catches
• 1,163 yards
• 9 touchdowns

A hundred-catch, hundred-and-fifty-target season is not a flash. That is a man who was the offence. And crucially for what happens next, the volume came before the payday rather than after it, which is the correct order and the one people always get backwards.

The Rule I Would Like You To Steal

Every summer I watch managers reach for a receiver because a coordinator said something warm about him in a press conference. Coordinators say warm things. It is the job. Nobody has ever walked to a podium in July and announced that they intend to ignore a player.

So when you cannot tell whether a team likes somebody, stop reading the quotes and go read the money. Specifically:

1. Guaranteed money beats average annual value. AAV is the number the agent wants printed. Guarantee is the number the owner had to sign off on.
2. Timing beats size. A team that pays a man before his last year has decided. A team that lets him play it out is keeping the receipt.
3. Position beats everything at the margins. Ninety million guaranteed to a receiver means the offence intends to throw. That is good for him and it is quietly good for the other pass-catchers in the building, because those targets do not appear out of nothing.

The Honest Caveat

I am not going to sit here and tell you a contract makes a man healthy, and I would be a hypocrite if I did after spending Thursday writing about a knee that ended a season in the first week of camp. Guaranteed money buys you a team's intent. It does not buy you availability, and availability is still the whole game.

What it does do is remove one of the two questions. With most receivers you are guessing about talent and guessing about opportunity. Here, New Orleans has answered the second one in writing, for ninety million dollars, in a document their lawyers read.