Yesterday, I looked at the way each team’s roster was concentrated in terms of salary cap dollars.  A few teams, like the Giants, Lions, and Vikings, were notable for allocating a significant portion of their 2019 salary cap dollars to their top players.  Meanwhile, the Jets, Bills, and Browns were on the other end of that spectrum.

Of course, the Jets, Bills, and Browns all drafted quarterbacks in the first round of the 2019 Draft, while the Giants, Lions, and Vikings are all paying big dollars to veteran quarterbacks. How would the data look if we excluded the top (by salary cap dollars) quarterback on each team?

I re-ran those numbers today.  Once again, we will be using the Concentration Index, described here, to “grade” each team’s roster construction. To summarize, we do the following steps:

1) Calculate the 2019 salary cap hit of the top 51 players on each team’s roster. Thanks to Over The Cap, I was able to collect this information.  Eliminate the highest paid QB on each team’s roster.

2) For each player on each team, calculate the percentage of team salary cap dollars spent on that player. For example, Denver’s Von Miller has a 2019 cap hit of $25.1M, and the Broncos top 50 players (excluding QB Joe Flacco) have a cap hit of $142M. Therefore, Miller is taking up 17.7% of Denver’s non-Flacco 2019 cap spend.

3) Square the result for each player (so Miller’s 17.7% becomes 3.1%), and then sum those results for each player on each team to get team grades.

By squaring the results, you give more weight to players taking up a larger percentage of their team’s pie.   The graph below shows each team.  The X-Axis shows the 2019 Salary Cap dollars each team spent on their 50 highest paid players, excluding their top quarterback.  The Y-Axis is the concentration index result.  The Broncos are at the top of the chart, thanks in large part due to Miller.  Ignoring Flacco, Denver’s top 6 players (Miller, Emmanuel Sanders, Derek Wolfe, Ronald Leary, Chris Harris, Jr., and newly-added Ja’Wuan James) are being paid $75M 2019 cap dollars, while the Broncos bottom 37 players (in their top 51) are being paid just $35.3M. That’s an extreme “studs and duds” approach that becomes even more clear once you remove all top-paid quarterbacks. [continue reading…]

The New York Giants have a very top-heavy salary cap structure. The team’s top five 2019 salary cap hits belong to Eli Manning, Nate Solder, Janoris Jenkins, Alec Ogletree, and Kevin Zeitler, and total a whopping $76.7 million. Meanwhile, the Giants players with the 6th through 51st largest cap hits total just $71.5 million. That’s absurdly top-heavy (and comes after moving on from Damon Harrison, Olivier Vernon and Odell Beckham over the last few months). The Giants organization has really embraced a “star and duds” approach.

Consider the Buffalo Bills, whose top-5 largest 2019 cap hits belong to Star Lotulelei, Mitch Morse, Jerry Hughes, LeSean McCoy, and Trent Murphy and total $50.6M. The rest of the top 51 salary cap hits on the roster total $107.5M. The Bills do not have a single player with a 2019 salary cap hit of $11.8M or greater; meanwhile, every other team in the NFL has at least two such players.

The Giants and Bills are at the extreme ends of salary cap/roster construction. One way to measure how concentrated (or not concentrated) a team’s salary cap is by using the Concentration Index, described here. In short, we do the following steps:

1) Calculate the 2019 salary cap hit of the top 51 players on each team’s roster. Thanks to Over The Cap, I was able to collect this information.

2) For each player on each team, calculate the percentage of team salary cap dollars spent on that player. For example, Kirk Cousins of the Vikings has a 2019 cap hit of $29M, and the Vikings top 51 players have a cap hit of $184M. Therefore, Cousins is taking up 15.8% of Minnesota’s 2019 cap spend.

3) Square the result for each player (so Cousins’s 15.8% becomes 2.5%), and then sum those results for each player on each team to get team grades.

By squaring the results, you give more weight to players taking up a larger percentage of their team’s pie. Matthew Stafford ($29.5M cap charge) has both the highest 2019 Cap charge in the league and since the Lions top 51 players only have cap hits totaling $160M, has the highest percentage of team cap charge at 18.4%. When you square that result, you get 3.4%. Meanwhile, for Buffalo, Lotulelei’s $11.5M charge represents 7.3% of Buffalo’s top 51 largest cap hits, and then drops to just 0.5% when you square the result.

When you sum those squared results for each team, the Giants stand out as the team with the largest concentration of salary cap dollars in the fewest players, at 7.0%. Meanwhile, the Bills have dispersed their salary cap dollars in the widest manner, at just 3.7%.

Another interesting team is Cleveland. The Browns are similar to Buffalo, and have spread their salary cap dollars around: their concentration index is just 4.2%, the second lowest in the league. But Cleveland also has spent the most 2019 salary cap dollars on its top 51 players, at a whopping $192M! Think about what that means: the Browns are paying a ton of money to their players in the aggregate, but spreading it around a lot. That must mean that Cleveland is paying a lot of people good money, and well, that’s exactly what’s happening. The Browns are paying 14 players at least $6.6M in 2019 cap dollars. No other team has more than 11 such players.

The graph below shows the results of today’s post. The X-Axis shows the 2019 salary cap dollars each team has spent on its top 51 players (no dead money is included). The Y-Axis shows the concentration index for each team for these 51 players. As you can see, the Giants (highly concentrated) are at the top of the chart, the Bills are at the bottom, the Browns are at the far right (lots of $$ spent), and the Dolphins (little $$ spent) are at the far left.

[continue reading…]

This time last year, the media chorus was signing that the running back position had been severely devalued in the modern NFL. Part of that, no doubt, was true: it is undeniable that less draft capital is being spent on running backs.

When I wrote about the 2014 Running Back Free Agent Market last year and how little they were being paid, I made sure to link to a pretty key point made by Jason Lisk at the Big Lead: the free agent class just wasn’t very good. Last year, the top free agent running backs were Toby Gerhart ($4.5M guaranteed, $7M over the first two years of his contract), Donald Brown ($4, $7), Rashad Jennings ($2.98, $5.25), Maurice Jones-Drew ($1.2, $5.0), Ben Tate ($2.5, $4.35), and Knowshon Moreno ($1.25, $4.25).

In case you forgot, here’s a quick summary of how those backs fared last year:

• Gerhart averaged 3.2 yards per carry over 101 carries and was benched;
• Brown averaged 2.6 YPC over 85 carries and was benched;
• Jennings rushed for 639 yards in 11 games, missing 5 due to injury;
• Jones-Drew averaged 2.2 YPC over 43 carries and is now retired;
• Tate was cut after 106 carries and 8 games;and
• Moreno was limited to 3 games due to injury.

This was an underwhelming class of free agent running backs that somehow fell far, far short of expectations.  Then, Chris Johnson joined the class, and signed a two-year, $8M contract with $4M guaranteed.  The Jets cut him after one season, where he gained 814 yards from scrimmage and scored two touchdowns in 16 games. [continue reading…]

As part of the new collective bargaining agreement, most rookies sign four-year contracts. But as further evidence of the owners’ success during negotiations in connection with the 2011 lockout, teams were granted a club option for a fifth year for all players selected in the first round. The option is only guaranteed for injury, however, so a team can exercise the option for 2011 first round picks and still release the player after the 2014 season.

For players in the top ten, that fifth year salary is equal to an average of the top ten highest-paid players at their position from the prior year. For players selected with picks 11 through 32 — and boy, that number 11 pick never looked as valuable as it did in 2011 — the fifth-year deal is worth an average of the salaries of the players with the 3rd through 25th highest salaries at their position.

The deadline for exercising the fifth-year option on 2011 first rounders is tomorrow, May 3rd.  As a reminder, here is a review of the first round of the 2011 Draft: [continue reading…]

It’s not much of a stretch to say that the Patriots, Broncos, 49ers, and Seahawks, and are four of the best organizations in the NFL. Over the last two years, these four teams are the only to win 23 games in the regular season or 26 games if you include the playoffs. In the salary cap era, being an excellent team means managing the salary cap well. And, broadly speaking, managing the cap well means finding good values for cheap and making sure the players you spend a premium on deliver commensurate production.

So is that true for New England, Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle? The invaluable Jason Fitzgerald of Over the Cap has salary cap data for each team in the league, which can answer half the problem. But how do we measure production? I decided to use the ratings from Pro Football Focus, since the website provides a rating of every player on every team (although I excluded special teamers from my analysis today).

One note about PFF data, which comes from Nathan Jahnke, a writer at the website. As he explained to me, PFF’s ratings are not necessarily designed for comparisons across positions. For each position, zero is average, but the magnitude a player’s rating can get to is somewhat dependent on the position they play. For example, PFF has never had a safety over a grade of +30, while five 3-4 DEs hit that mark in 2013. For my purposes today, this is not a big concern — it just means view the graphs with an understand that these are not designed to be the perfect way to compare a player. But in general, I think they work well. (And, of course, don’t think that just because Brandon Mebane has a higher rating than Russell Wilson that it means PFF thinks Mebane is a more valuable player.)

To avoid people using my graphs to scrub data and steal the hard work put in by by Over The Cap and Pro Football Focus in assembling the salary cap data and player grades , I have decided not to label either axis with salary information or player ratings. Just know that the X-axis (that’s the horizontal one) is for salary, and players on the left are cheap and players on the right are expensive. The vertical or Y-axis shows the PFF grades from worst (on the bottom) to best on top). Note: to compare across teams, I have used the exact same dimensions for both axes across all four graphs. [continue reading…]

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.

[continue reading…]

Here’s the introduction to an old fantasy football article by my fellow Footballguys staffer Maurile Tremblay:

In most fantasy football leagues, eligible players are divided into 6 different positions: quarterback, running back, wide receiver, tight end, placekicker, and special teams/defense. Imagine a league that includes a seventh position, team captain, which earns points each week based solely on the initial coin toss. For example, if you’ve got the Raiders as your starting TC and the Raiders win their coin toss, you get 30 points; if the Raiders lose their coin toss, you get nothing.

Under the current laws of probability, we can expect any particular team captain to win about 8 out of its 16 coin tosses over the course of the season, winding up with about 240 total fantasy points — so let’s use that as our VBD baseline. There will probably be one or two team captains, however, that win around 12 tosses, making them about 120 points better than average. That makes the top team captain pretty valuable!

So how long should we wait before drafting our TC1? Is the first round too early? The second?

Of course, anything before the final round is too early! Coin flips are random, so while some TCs will end up scoring many more points than others over the course of the season, there’s no way to know which ones. We should therefore be totally indifferent to which TC we end up with.

That’s not the case with, say, running backs. We may be fairly confident that Eddie George will score more points than Tim Biakabutuka. So while we have no good reason to prefer the Raiders’ team captain to the Chiefs’, we should quite rationally prefer George to Biak. And as it makes sense to spend our early draft choices filling positions where our preferences are strongest — indeed, that is the essence of VBD — we ought to generally draft our RBs before we draft our TCs.
[continue reading…]

How much money *should* Tom Brady be paid? What are the appropriate cap figures for Tony Romo and Darrelle Revis? This series looks to derive the appropriate salary cap value for each player in the NFL.

Let’s start with the basics, which will include many generalities and rough estimates. I have chosen to ignore all players who are in the first three years of their rookie contracts; while we could try to determine the “fair market” cap values for Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin III and J.J. Watt, that would be nothing more than an academic exercise because their 2013 salary cap figures are set in stone. Instead, my goal is to determine the appropriate salary cap values for NFL Veterans (in this post, “Veterans” means all players with at least three prior years of NFL experience).

Note that ALL of the numbers in this post can be manipulated by each user thanks to the Salary Cap Calculator below. Your opinions regarding my assumptions should not interfere with your use of the salary cap calculator.

The salary cap in 2013 is $123.9M, but because players on injured reserve count against the cap, a buffer is needed to sign healthy players during the season. On average, each team will have placed on their roster 64 different players. Some of those players will be signed during the year and may only be on the team for a few weeks, so they won’t cost a significant percentage of the cap. On the other hand, a couple of players are usually on IR before the season even starts. Let’s assume that teams should spend 96% of their cap dollars on the healthy 53 players on their week 1 roster. The next step is figuring out how many of those salary cap dollars will go to non-Veterans.
[continue reading…]

There are four things the Jets could do with Darrelle Revis.

Option 1: Trade him before the draft to the team (not in the AFC East or in New York) willing to offer the most.

Option 2: Trade him during the five-month period after the draft but before the trading deadline, under the assumption that Revis will be able to fetch more in return once he is healthy and playing at his old level (assumption #2). [Update: As pointed out to me on twitter, the Jets will also incur the $9M penalty discussed in Option 3 if Revis is traded after June 1st.]

Option 3: Have Revis play out his contract, and then watch him sign with another team in the off-season (or enter a bidding war and try to win Revis on the open market). In return, the Jets will receive a compensatory draft pick, roughly the 100th pick in the 2015 draft. And, since Revis was given an $18M bonus on a six-year deal in 2011 — a deal that Revis has the option of voiding after this season — the Jets will also incur a nine million dollar cap penalty in 2014.

Option 4: Re-sign Revis to a mega deal now. The Jets will get a slight discount off the enormous contract Revis would get on the open market based on the questions about his knee and the fact that he’s due to make “only” $9M in 2012.

[continue reading…]

The Maurice Jones-Drew holdout is slightly different than the typical holdouts we see every summer. As a 27-year-old running back, Jones-Drew is seeking his last big contract. But with a new owner and regime in Jacksonville, management is understandably hesitant to give a large contract to a player who already has two years remaining on his deal. The difference between Jones-Drew and most players is that this is his last chance to cash in. If he plays out his contract, even if he plays well the next two seasons, he’s unlikely to get a huge deal in 2014.

Would that be fair? I would hope that some of those writers who argued in favor of reducing rookie contracts would find such a result unjust, as a talented, star player should be rewarded with a big contract. ^[1]This is obviously shtick, but I do find it hypocritical for owners to argue against paying “unproven” players and then to argue against paying aging players who “have little … Continue reading But even if he performs well in 2012 and 2013, by 2014, Jones-Drew would be a 29-year-old runner who had just endured five years of punishment as a workhorse running back. No team would sign him to a large contract at that point, as he could not be expected to continue to produce at such a high level.

When it comes to running backs, it is understood that they must try to maximize their salaries when they are young, as big paydays for older runners are few and far between. But in this situation, some have argued that since this is Jones-Drew’s second contract, he should honor his deal (or, alternatively, that we should be less sympathetic to his cause). In 2009, Jones-Drew signed his second contract, and the argument goes that unlike a rookie contract — where players have almost no leverage — Jones-Drew already had his bite at the apple. But that argument ignores the fact that Jones-Drew’s rookie contract remains part of his current predicament.
[continue reading…]