So you think making $35M in 13 years as an NFL quarterback without being expected to do basically anything is a smash and grab kinda job?

It’s slightly more complicated than that.

Chase Daniel Ocean just signed a 3-year $10.05M deal to continue his services of not playing actual football to add to his $35M earnings he’s accumulated from an 11-year body of work also not playing football.

Think I’m being dramatic? Yes, but that doesn’t mean that I’m wrong. In his entire career, Chase Daniel has thrown precisely 218 regular season NFL passes. For sake of record, this equates to $160,675.30 per (official) earned per pass attempt he’s earned in these 11 years. Typically, NFL starting quarterbacks attempt around 500 passes per season. To put this in perspective, if Daniel were to ever throw that many passes in a single season and get paid at the per attempt rate he is accustomed to, one hapless NFL team would be looking at forking over a smooth $80,337,654 for that season. Oh yeah, and did I mention he’s a backup? Put the phone down Bill O’Brien.

In all honesty though, Chase Daniel is like any good American sitting in their cube for 8 hours doing about 24 minutes of actual work. And like any corporation, this is what managers look for when giving out pay raises. Looking the part is half the battle and the other half goes in the books as lunch.

Let’s get the full picture here. Below I graphed out every quarterback since 2009 and created a bar graph to show the amount of money each has earned in his career. The list is sorted from top-down not by earnings, but by number of passes attempted since 2009.

(some QBs were removed who ended their career soon after 2009 and made considerable salaries such as Brett Favre, Kurt Warner and others)

Generally speaking, as you move from left to right, there is a correlation between pass attempts and salary earned. You’ll notice the names on the left are the mega stars. Brady leads in pass attempts ahead of a slew of greats. Jimmy G stands out in the middle after getting his big pay day last year and things trickle down more and more from there until finally Chase Daniel brings up the rear of the graph. As you can see the disparity in salary between him and the next 20 or so names is, for a back-up, quite frankly insane.

Let’s compare Chase with a similar perennial backup – Derek Anderson. Derek played in the league two more years than Daniel (13) and even got a starting quarterback deal with the Browns at one point and still came up a couple million shy of Daniel’s current earnings. Even Drew Stanton got a starting gig paycheck and never quite made the career earnings of Daniel.

11 years in the league. $35 Million dollar purse. No expectation to do any real work. That my friends, is the Chase Daniel Ocean’s 11. 11 outta do it for you right Chase? You think you need three more? You think you need three more.

All right, go get three more.