Is Colts WR Alec Pierce worth his $116 million contract? Here's how he could live up to it

The first major move of the NFL's so-called "legal tampering period" Monday was not necessarily a surprising one, but it likely gave many observers sticker shock when the price hit. The Indianapolis Colts retained wide receiver Alec Pierce with a four-year, $116 million contract. The deal reportedly contains $80 million in total guarantees, $60 million of which is fully guaranteed at signing.

That contract is the largest ever given to a free-agent wide receiver, and the eight-largest for any receiver on either a new deal or an extension. Only Ja'Marr Chase, Justin Jefferson, CeeDee Lamb, DK Metcalf, Garrett Wilson, Amon-Ra St. Brown and Brandon Aiyuk have ever signed contracts worth more.

It also makes Pierce the NFL's ninth-highest-paid receiver by average annual value ($29 million). The following table shows the total contract value, average annual value and fully guaranteed sum for the top 10 in total value, as well as the two other players ahead of or tied with Pierce on the average annual value front.

Suffice to say that the numbers on Pierce's deal are astronomical. They were achievable through a confluence of events like the skyrocketing salary cap and the lack of other high-quality receivers reaching free agency this offseason, but it's still a bit shocking to see a player like Pierce make this much money.

The question now is whether his play to date has justified such a deal and, more importantly, whether he can prove himself worth the money over the life of his new contract.

The answer to the first question is obvious, and it's no. Pierce has pretty clearly not been one of the 10 or so best receivers in football to date in his career. The former second-round pick ranks 55th in targets, 94th in receptions, 34th in receiving yards and 42nd in receiving touchdowns since he entered the NFL in 2022. He set career highs this past season with 84 targets, 47 catches and 1,003 yards while his six touchdown grabs were the second-most of his career.

Even when you consider that Pierce leads the NFL in yards per reception during this span (and has done so in each of the past two years) with an 18.7-yard average that clears every other player by 1.7 yards, it's close to impossible to make an argument that he has been a top 10 target in the league to date.

That's what makes the second question the more interesting one. It also has a more complicated answer.

Pierce has been a role player throughout his career. He's almost exclusively operated as a deep threat, with an average depth of target of 16.84 yards, according to Tru Media. That figure is the third-highest among the 229 players with 100-plus targets during that span.

His average route depth (the point at which he reaches his break on a route) of 11.42 yards, meanwhile, has checked in first. Simply put, he has run the deepest routes of any player in football since he entered the league and been targeted farther down the field than almost any player in all of football during that time.

As a result, Pierce doesn't have the same type of target rate that is typical of highly paid receivers. He's been thrown the ball on just 14.7% of his routes during his career, according to Tru Media. That ranks 197th out of the aforementioned group of 229 players.

If you limit the sample to just the 130 qualifying wide receivers, it still ranks 109th. Even this past season, when he set all his career highs, Pierce checked in 62nd in target rate among the 79 wideouts who were targeted 50 or more times. He simply hasn't been a target earner at the level of those other players.

Chase is 12th among receivers in target rate since 2022 (Pierce's first NFL season), for example. Jefferson is 11th. Lamb is seventh. St. Brown is fifth, followed by Brown (ninth), Wilson (19th), Aiyuk (33rd), Metcalf (36th), McLaurin (45th) and Moore (49th). Higgins is 51st despite playing alongside Chase.

Again, Pierce is 109th. He's simply been in a different league than the others when it comes to earning targets.

He's been better in terms of efficiency but still not quite at the same level as the others. His yards per route run average, according to Tru Media, checks in 66th among the same group of players. (Yards per route essentially combines targets per route and yards per target, the latter of which being where Pierce excels as he ranks seventh in the NFL there.)

Again, Brown ranks fourth in yards per route since 2022 while Lamb (fifth) Jefferson (sixth), St. Brown (seventh), Aiyuk (ninth), Chase (13th), McLaurin (27th), Metcalf (29th), Higgins (37th), Wilson (45th) and Moore (47th) follow.

It's worth noting that Pierce did rank 16th in yards per route this past season, an encouraging sign that he can be more efficient than he had been through his first three years. He's also shown improvement on that front with each passing season, going from 0.85 yards per route as a rookie to 1.24 as a sophomore, 1.83 in his third season and finally 2.11 this past year.

The latter figure is a really good number, but we also need to see it sustain before it becomes bankable. The year-to-year improvement provides reason for optimism, but it's worth noting that said improvement did come in a hyper-specialized role. To justify the increase in compensation, the Colts are going to want things to shift, and that could affect his efficiency. 

The Colts are projecting "8-10" targets per game for Pierce next season, ESPN's Stephen Holder reported, but that seems like an unlikely projection -- even if they want to get him there. As Stealing Signals author Ben Gretch noted, eight targets per game works out to 136 targets and only eight wide receivers hit that mark in 2025. Pierce's career high, as previously mentioned, is 84 targets, which is just north of 5.5 targets per game. (He played 15 of Indy's 17 games.)

It would take a significant change in role for Pierce to suddenly earn targets at that level. Some of that role change will surely come thanks to Michael Pittman Jr.'s exit via trade, but hitting that lofty projection is still something that would require a massive leap in target-earning -- and targets do tend to be earned as opposed to merely given. A player's target rate changing that significantly is rare, even accounting for the situational factors that are likely to affect Pierce's role here.

Additionally, if Pierce's role changes significantly, that would likely take away from some of the vertical element that Pierce brings to the Indianapolis passing game. Fifty-two of Pierce's 84 targets last season came at least 15 yards downfield, according to Tru Media. That figure led the NFL. Those targets accounted for 769 of his 1,004 receiving yards and five of his six end-zone trips.

If he's going to be targeted more often, it stands to reason that he will have to run more routes in the short and intermediate areas of the field, simply because teams aren't going to throw deep a million times a game -- especially with defenses prioritizing taking away explosive plays and now more likely to devote attention to Pierce in that area thanks to both his contract and the absence of Pittman.

But Pierce earned just 32 targets inside of 15 yards on his 475 total routes in 2025, according to Tru Media, and he averaged a mere 0.71 yards per route run when targeted on those short and intermediate routes. In other words, he was even less likely to earn targets on those plays and inefficient as a result. He'd have to take a pretty significant leap not only as a target-earner but also in his ability to turn those targets into receptions and yards in order to justify the change in role that the Colts apparently expect for him.

Is all of this possible for Pierce to accomplish? Sure. But that doesn't necessarily make it likely. More unlikely things have probably happened in the past, but unlikely events coming to fruition doesn't retroactively make them more likely to have occurred in the first place. And in the event that Pierce doesn't contribute at a high level on the short and intermediate routes and instead remains a pure deep threat, he's unlikely to prove worth the money Indianapolis laid out to keep him around.