Jacoby Brissett is showing up. The contract he wants? Still very much in the air.
ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler and Josh Weinfuss reported Sunday that the Arizona Cardinals quarterback will report to mandatory minicamp this week after skipping the team’s voluntary offseason program. It is a soft landing on a holdout that was starting to get awkward.
The math here is not complicated. NFL rules say a veteran who skips mandatory minicamp gets hit with a $107,911 fine. Brissett is not a guy who can casually wave off that kind of money, especially while negotiating a reworked deal. Showing up is the only move that keeps his leverage intact.
Here is where it gets weird. Brissett signed a two-year, $12.5 million deal with the Cardinals in 2025. He is set to make $4.88 million in 2026, which could climb to $5.39 million with escalators. Backup Gardner Minshew II, who Arizona signed in March on a one-year, $5.75 million deal, has $5.14 million guaranteed. Minshew, the backup, is making more guaranteed money than the starter.
That is the contract gripe in a nutshell. Brissett earned the QB1 job. Arizona has already told him publicly that he is their guy. And he is still looking up at his own backup on the cap sheet. Most quarterbacks would have a real problem with that. Brissett does.
The case for paying him is fine, if not overwhelming. In 2025, his first year with the Cardinals, Brissett threw for 3,366 yards and 23 touchdowns against eight interceptions on a 64.9 percent completion rate across 14 games and 12 starts. He stabilized a team that needed stability. He did not blow up the season. He did not embarrass anyone.
The case against giving him a raise is that those numbers are basically the Brissett ceiling. He has been a productive bridge quarterback for a decade now, from Indianapolis to Miami to Cleveland to Washington to Arizona. Teams pay him to not lose them games. They do not pay him to win them games. There is a real difference, and the Cardinals know it.
Head coach Jonathan Gannon is trying to keep the locker room together while general manager Monti Ossenfort works the cap. The Cardinals have other priorities this offseason, including extensions for younger core pieces and the rookie class. Reworking a backup-money deal for a starter is the kind of clean win that should get done.
If it does not, Brissett’s leverage falls off a cliff after this week. Once minicamp ends and training camp opens in late July, the league is in business mode. Holdouts during camp cost roughly $50,000 a day. Holdouts into the regular season get really ugly really fast.
Brissett is taking the smart route. Show up, fulfill the contract obligation, let his agent and the Cardinals figure out the rest in the background. That is how veterans handle these things when they know they are running out of contract years.
The Cardinals are projected to be one of the more interesting teams in the NFC West this year. Quarterback drama in June would have set a bad tone. Brissett just made sure that does not happen.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
