In Part I, I derived a formula to translate the number of marginal wins a veteran player was worth into marginal salary cap dollars (my answer was $14.6M, but the Salary Cap Calculator lets you answer that question on your own terms). We can also translate Approximate Value into wins using a similar method.
Each NFL team generates about 201 points of Approximate Value per season, or 6,440 points of AV per season in the 32-team era. I ran a linear regression using team AV as the input and wins as the output, which produced a formula of
Team Wins = -9.63 + 0.0876*AV
This means that adding one point of AV to a team is expected to result in 0.0876 additional wins. In other words, for a 201-AV team to jump from 8 to 9 wins, they need to produce 11.4 additional points of AV.
A player who can deliver 11.4 marginal points of AV is therefore worth one win to a team, or 14.6 million marginal salary cap dollars (or whatever number you choose). Alternatively, you can think of it like this: a player who is worth $1.277M marginal dollars should be expected to produce 1 additional point of AV and 0.0876 additional wins. In case the math made you lose the forest for the trees, this is all a reflection of the amount of wins we decide the replacement team is worth, as the formula is circular: if a team spends all of its $72.877M marginal dollars, they should get 57.07 marginal points of AV, or 5 extra wins, the amount needed to make a replacement team equal to an average team.
Next we need to focus just on Veterans, defined as players in their fourth year or later. The table below shows how much AV is provided by all players in the NFL by year, as a percentage of league-wide AV. The right column shows the amount of cumulative AV provided by all players that year and younger:
| Year | % of Lg AV | Cumulative % |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 8.8% | 8.8% |
| 2 | 12.3% | 21.1% |
| 3 | 12.6% | 33.7% |
| 4 | 12.2% | 45.9% |
| 5 | 11.4% | 57.3% |
| 6 | 10% | 67.3% |
| 7 | 8.6% | 75.9% |
| 8 | 7.1% | 83% |
| 9 | 5.3% | 88.3% |
| 10 | 4% | 92.3% |
| 11 | 2.9% | 95.3% |
| 12 | 2% | 97.2% |
| 13 | 1.2% | 98.4% |
| 14 | 0.7% | 99.2% |
| 15 | 0.4% | 99.6% |
| 16+ | 0.4% | 100% |
Players in their first three seasons provide over one-third of the average team’s value, while nearly half of a team’s AV comes from players in their first four seasons. In 2012, for example, Veterans produced 3958 points of AV. Since we have theorized that all Veterans produce a total of 160 marginal wins, or 5 marginal wins per team, you might think we just want to divide 3958 by 160, but that’s not exactly right because it ignores the concept of marginal AV. Doing so would suggest that one win was worth 24.7 points of AV, and we just determined that one win was worth slightly fewer than half as many points of AV.
This makes sense — a player with one or two points of AV isn’t really doing much, and certainly isn’t doing much that isn’t easily replaceable. What we need to do is subtract a certain number of points from each player to reduce the total pile of points of AV from Veterans from 3958 to 1824 (11.4 * 160). I’ll spare you the complicated math, but that number turns out to be 3.36 points of AV from each player in 2012. What this means is that every Veteran with 3 or fewer points of AV is therefore worth $850K salary cap dollars (our average Veterans minimum). For Veterans with 4 or more points of AV, we subtract 3.36 points of AV to figure out their amount of marginal AV provided, and multiply that number by $1.277M to give us the amount of marginal salary cap dollars they were worth. Add $850K to that number, and you get that player’s salary cap dollar value for 2013 assuming they produce exactly as they did in 2012. I have included a list of the top 100 or so Veterans at the bottom of this post.
But first, let’s take a step back and remember how AV was created. There are many situations, including this one, where we need a metric that is capable of comparing players across positions. In baseball and basketball, lots of stats have been cooked up to do this, and analytics folks have done so with a reasonable degree of precision. In football, no such stat existed prior to Doug’s creation of AV. In most cases, people used “starter” or “number of years as a starter” or “number of pro bowls” as the metric when they had to compare across positions.
AV was intended to be an improvement over those metrics, and nothing more. It is not Not NOT an ubermetric whose purpose is to decide once and for all who the best players in the NFL are. So I should not Not NOT rank all the players in the NFL according to AV, translate those AV values into salaries, and present them in a list. To do so would be to imply that I’ve done something I haven’t done. To do so would be to invite links from team message boards where the first post is “some guy posted a list saying Charles Tillman is worth Seventeen Million Dollars!” and the second post is “I stopped reading as soon as I saw Cameron Wake ranked ahead of Aaron Rodgers. What a bozo!”
I now present to you a list of the amount of Salary Cap Dollars that the top Veterans are worth based on their performance last season:
Name Team Pos AV MarAV Wins Salary (in millions) Adrian Peterson MIN RB 19 15.64 1.37 $20.82 Tom Brady NWE QB 18 14.64 1.28 $19.55 Julius Peppers CHI RE 18 14.64 1.28 $19.55 Matt Ryan ATL QB 18 14.64 1.28 $19.55 Cameron Wake MIA RDE 18 14.64 1.28 $19.55 Aaron Rodgers GNB QB 17 13.64 1.20 $18.27 Charles Tillman CHI RCB 16 12.64 1.11 $16.99 Vince Wilfork NWE DT 16 12.64 1.11 $16.99 Peyton Manning DEN QB 15 11.64 1.02 $15.72 Drew Brees NOR QB 15 11.64 1.02 $15.72 Eli Manning NYG QB 15 11.64 1.02 $15.72 Wes Welker NWE WR 15 11.64 1.02 $15.72 Marshawn Lynch SEA RB 15 11.64 1.02 $15.72 Patrick Willis SFO ILB 15 11.64 1.02 $15.72
NOTE FOR PEOPLE WHO SKIPPED STRAIGHT DOWN TO THE LIST WITHOUT READING THE POST: the author who generated this list does not agree with the entirety of this list. He, in fact, acknowledges that it’s obviously wrong in spots. He does think it’s pretty respectable, given the difficulty of comparing players across positions using only objective data without just saying that Tom Brady and Peyton Manning are worth 10 wins each. He also thinks it’ll give us something to talk about here in April.
We now return to the list.
Name Team Pos AV MarAV Wins Salary (in millions) Andre Johnson HOU WR 14 10.64 0.93 $14.44 Tony Romo DAL QB 14 10.64 0.93 $14.44 Roddy White ATL WR 14 10.64 0.93 $14.44 Brandon Marshall CHI WR 14 10.64 0.93 $14.44 Jahri Evans NOR RG 14 10.64 0.93 $14.44 Calvin Johnson DET WR 14 10.64 0.93 $14.44 Ryan Clady DEN LT 14 10.64 0.93 $14.44 Max Unger SEA C 14 10.64 0.93 $14.44 Champ Bailey DEN LCB 13 9.64 0.84 $13.16 Tim Jennings CHI LCB 13 9.64 0.84 $13.16 Haloti Ngata BAL DT 13 9.64 0.84 $13.16 Joe Flacco BAL QB 13 9.64 0.84 $13.16 Ray Rice BAL RB 13 9.64 0.84 $13.16 Josh Freeman TAM QB 13 9.64 0.84 $13.16 Matthew Stafford DET QB 13 9.64 0.84 $13.16 Tony Gonzalez ATL TE 12 8.64 0.76 $11.89 London Fletcher WAS MLB 12 8.64 0.76 $11.89 Justin Smith SFO RDE 12 8.64 0.76 $11.89 Matt Schaub HOU QB 12 8.64 0.76 $11.89 Vincent Jackson TAM WR 12 8.64 0.76 $11.89 Eric Weddle SDG FS 12 8.64 0.76 $11.89 Ahmad Brooks SFO OLB 12 8.64 0.76 $11.89 Chad Greenway MIN OLB 12 8.64 0.76 $11.89 Elvis Dumervil DEN RDE 12 8.64 0.76 $11.89 Joe Staley SFO LT 12 8.64 0.76 $11.89 Ed Reed BAL FS 11 7.64 0.67 $10.61 Lance Briggs CHI OLB 11 7.64 0.67 $10.61 DeMarcus Ware DAL ROLB 11 7.64 0.67 $10.61 Jay Cutler CHI QB 11 7.64 0.67 $10.61 Ahmad Bradshaw NYG RB 11 7.64 0.67 $10.61 Lawrence Timmons PIT RILB 11 7.64 0.67 $10.61 Dashon Goldson SFO FS 11 7.64 0.67 $10.61 Joe Thomas CLE LT 11 7.64 0.67 $10.61 Jerod Mayo NWE ILB 11 7.64 0.67 $10.61 Duane Brown HOU LT 11 7.64 0.67 $10.61 Clay Matthews GNB ROLB 11 7.64 0.67 $10.61 Reggie Wayne IND WR 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Steve Smith CAR WR 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Paris Lenon ARI ILB 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Larry Foote PIT LILB 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Brandon Lloyd NWE WR 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Jason Witten DAL TE 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Philip Rivers SDG QB 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Carson Palmer OAK QB 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Ben Roethlisberger PIT QB 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Jared Allen MIN RDE 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Chris Snee NYG RG 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Ryan Fitzpatrick BUF QB 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Frank Gore SFO RB 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Chris Clemons SEA RDE 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Marques Colston NOR WR 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Johnathan Joseph HOU RCB 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Antonio Cromartie NYJ CB 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Brandon Mebane SEA RDT 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Matt Forte CHI RB 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Martellus Bennett NYG TE 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Arian Foster HOU RB 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Jairus Byrd BUF FS 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Michael Crabtree SFO WR 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Sebastian Vollmer NWE RT 10 6.64 0.58 $9.33 Jeff Saturday GNB C 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 John Abraham ATL RDE 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Ryan Clark PIT FS 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Brett Keisel PIT DE 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Anquan Boldin BAL WR 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Karlos Dansby MIA MLB 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Jonathan Babineaux ATL DT 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Kevin Burnett MIA LOLB 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Derrick Johnson KAN RILB 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Heath Miller PIT TE 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Logan Mankins NWE LG 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Lance Moore NOR WR 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Andrew Whitworth CIN LT 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 D'Qwell Jackson CLE MLB 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 LaRon Landry NYJ S 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Stephen Nicholas ATL OLB 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Nick Roach CHI OLB 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 David Harris NYJ ILB 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Alan Branch SEA LDT 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Greg Olsen CAR TE 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Sidney Rice SEA WR 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Marshall Yanda BAL RG 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Jermon Bushrod NOR LT 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Chris Johnson TEN RB 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Jamaal Charles KAN RB 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Steve Johnson BUF WR 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Jermichael Finley GNB TE 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Jo-Lonn Dunbar STL OLB 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Wesley Woodyard DEN OLB 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Sam Baker ATL LT 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Tyler Polumbus WAS RT 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Percy Harvin MIN WR 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Brian Hartline MIA WR 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 James Laurinaitis STL MLB 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Michael Johnson CIN RDE 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Evander Hood PIT DE 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 Ryan Wendell NWE C 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06 William Beatty NYG T 9 5.64 0.49 $8.06