If it didn't, the NSA would not be so interested in collecting it. Paranoid people who believe they might be being listened in on are unlikely to reveal much directly in the conversation itself anyway, so in those cases the metadata is more important. Also, the metadata can reveal anomalous behavior, which they look for mainly because it's easy to find, but also because it can reveal important information assuming the targets are correctly selected.

Anyway, the only reason they aren't collecting the calls themselves is because the storage required is not yet available, so their begging off about "but we aren't storing the content" is disingenuous. They can, at any moment, capture any call going over the long-distance network (which would include pretty much all cell phone calls) so the only thing they're unable to do is to retroactively listen in on calls. If you are flagged for whatever reason (you know someone who knows someone who knows someone they suspect of sending money to a bad charity), you may well be being monitored.