Yesterday, news broke that Derek Stingley Jr. had agreed to an extension with the Houston Texans, with multiple reports stating it was for three years and $90 million, thus $30 million APY. It was further clarified that the extension is appended not only to Stingley’s $5.43 million in cash that he was due on his rookie contract in 2025, but also a $17.595 million fifth year option that was available to be exercised in 2026.

This has led to some criticism that expressing this agreement as a $30M APY contract is misleading. Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk instead argues that the remaining seasons on his rookie contract should be included, which would thus be expressed as $113 million over five seasons, or $22.6 million APY.

This got me curious into taking a look as to how the APYs of extensions compare to the APYs of typical contracts, where the starting season is the same as when it was signed, and to see what differences there were. This was easy to do with how we structure our contracts at OTC, where we express extensions in new money value (so for Stingley, $90 million over three seasons) and then denote the season that the extension actually starts (again with Stingley, his contract is marked as signed in 2025, but starting in 2027).

I took a look at the highest APYs by season and position from 2013 to 2025. This data is lengthy, so I will instead share it at this link to a Google Sheets document, which readers are free to look at.

What was found is that there is not that much variation between each position over each season. Obviously there will be outliers in either direction on occasion, but over this time period, the average amount of difference is only about $428,000, while the median difference is even smaller, at $85,417.

When broken down by average difference in APY by position, as shown below, the trends remain similar. The average of this averages is very similar, at about $450,000 and the median at about $152,000.

The bottom line as I see it is that teams and agents are collectively doing a good job of accurately projecting where APYs will go when they sign extensions. Any one team or player is of course capable of getting a good deal on any single contract, but overall there does not appear to be a major advantage either way to getting an extension done, as the market corrects for seeing the new data points. There has been worthwhile criticism to consider about how news of contract data is disseminated. However, I think it’s also worthwhile to draw a consistent line between expressing extensions in new money terms (as we do here at OTC), and using a different expression is likely just going to muddy the waters with confusion, while not changing core negotiation factors.