The Two Distinct Roster Construction Strategies in the NFL

With seven teams making changes to their quarterback position over the last two months, now would be a great time to discuss the two main team building strategies that teams typically employ in the NFL today, plus a third middle of the pack spending strategy that more teams are employing in 2018 than they have the last few years, which could make teams with less productive, but still competent veteran quarterbacks more competitive, although this strategy isn’t very widespread. This conversation is an extension of the conversation in chapter five of Caponomics: Building Super Bowl Champions where I discuss the quarterback market and how about half of the NFL spends over 10% of the cap on their quarterback each year, which decreases the potential strategic avenues to success for many teams with average quarterbacks being paid first tier money.

The two main strategies for success in the NFL today are to either spend over 10% of the cap on your veteran quarterback or have a rookie contract quarterback leading your team. Illustrated in the graphic below, you’ll see that 16 teams employ a strategy with a quarterback over 10% of the cap, 10 have a quarterback under 5% of the cap either as a veteran or on his rookie contract, and six teams have a potential starter between five and ten percent of the cap.

What we’re concerned with in this article and with most of the stuff I try to analyze from the team perspective is what teams have the highest probability of Super Bowl success by analzying the spending strategy they employ and those strategies start at the quarterback position. In today’s NFL the two main strategies of over 10% veteran quarterback versus rookie contract quarterbacks has created two distinct strategies. The over the 10% strategy typically leads to a roster centered around the quarterback and his performance, which can typically lead to some holes on the defensive side of the ball unless the front office can string together some great drafts and find low-cost free agents who can contribute.

Kirk Cousins’ signing to Minnesota looks like a great fit because they already built out the NFL’s best defense in 2017; they’ve added Sheldon Richardson in 2018 as well to fill a key need, and they’re just plopping Cousins in that very well rounded and talented roster. They have some savings on defense and rookie contract contributors, plus Adam Thielen and Stefon Diggs producing at a level much higher than two players their combined cost of 3.90% of the cap would normally create with Dalvin Cook looking like a top running back at just 0.81% of the cap. They also have Latavius Murray, another starting quality running back, at 2.93% of the cap. The top two paid wide receivers and top paid running back cost for the past 23 Super Bowl champions of the cap era is 11.03% of the cap on average, so they’re getting elite production for 6.83% of the cap, which is 62% of that average Super Bowl cost. If you’re looking at that and the offense as a unit, that’s like having another 4.20% of the cap to play with. It’s those kinds of savings that allow a team to put out the money for Cousins and expect to still field a complete roster.

Some of those savings went to Kyle Rudolph as their top paid offensive skill player at 4.33% of the cap. He’s a tight end who could produce 600 to 700 yards if given the opportunity in their deep offensive skill group. He peaked with 83 catches for 840 yards and 7 touchdowns in 2016, but that was on 132 targets, which isn’t something he’s likely to see now that the offense appears much deeper, especially with today’s addition of wide receiver Kendall Wright who was one of the NFL’s top slot receivers with a Pro Football Focus tracked 80.4% catch rate with 1.36 yards per route tun out of the slot. Most importantly Rudolph provides them another elite mismatch that defenses have to deal with and a redzone target that helps improve the probability of touchdowns when the team gets down there. This is similar to the tight end based spending strategy I advocate for in Caponomics as the Patriots have created an offense in this same manner, with Rob Gronkowski, a much more productive tight end, as their key piece they’ve built around with low-cost receivers. The Vikings made the same move and Thielen and Diggs have exceeded expectations. The whole offensive skill group of the quarterback, top paid running back, top paid three receivers, and tight end cost 25.42% of the cap, which is actually far below what the teams with the two most expensive Super Bowl champion quarterbacks paid for their top offensive skill players as the 1994 49ers’ group cost 31.81%, while the 2015 Broncos’ group cost 29.16%. It’s those savings elsewhere that make the Cousins’ deal so sensible, but not every team that’s spending a lot of money on their quarterback has this kind of roster or these kinds of savings.

The rookie contract strategy is one we saw the Eagles and Jaguars use to success in 2017 as they had low-cost quarterbacks, which then allowed them to invest heavily on the defensive side of the ball, specifically their defensive lines. Investing heavily in the defensive line creates a scenario for teams where they can decrease the performance of their opponent’s quarterback to a level where their rookie contract quarterback can lead their offense to a better performance and secure victory.

The six teams with veteran quarterbacks between five and ten percent of the cap are the Bengals, Browns, Jaguars, Broncos, Cardinals, and Jets. This is a slightly higher total than in past years with it being just the Bengals, Bills, and Raiders, in the first year of the Derek Carr extension, being three teams executing this strategy in 2017. The Bears had Mike Glennon at 8.38% of the cap, but that quickly became a rookie quarterback situation and Glennon was simply a poor investment, so they would count as a fourth. The Bills obviously had their playoff success, but were ready to move on from Taylor as he became an over 10% of the cap player for them in 2018, which is just not what he’s worth as someone who produced just 187 passing yards per game in 2017. Taylor is now a Brown at 9.03% of the cap, but they have a cap of $241 million with cap carryover and he’s a great one-year bridge quarterback to help whoever they draft at #1 grow as a player and Taylor will help the team compete immediately. Out of these teams, the Jaguars, Broncos, and Cardinals stand a reasonable chance of being serious playoff contenders with the Jaguars being a serious Super Bowl contender after giving Bortles an extension that brought him down from over 10% to 5.64%. This allowed them to make some of the moves necessary to keep a solid roster around him as extra $9 million they gained from extending Bortles helped them secure both Marqise Lee and sign Donte Moncrief in what was a questionable decision. The Browns could even contend for a playoff spot with cap carryover bringing them up to a $241 million cap with 9 more draft picks to use in 2018 along with some big improvements already this offseason. The Jets have Josh McCown at 5.64% of the cap, plus Teddy Bridgewater at 3.39% of the cap, giving them two veteran quarterbacks who could potentially lead the team as Bridgewater has injury concerns. Both are on one-year deals.

The Broncos and Cardinals had down 2017 seasons in years where they came in with high expectations, but their signings of Case Keenum and Sam Bradford respectively put them in a position to compete. If the Broncos can improve their offensive line, Keenum might be playing with a similar strategic formula to what got him to the NFC Championship in Minnesota, while Bradford will have a good defense and a healthy David Johnson at running back. Having serious contenders in this window of quarterback spending is a trend I hope continues because the current quarterback market is in a place where average players are being paid first tier money, while great players at other positions don’t see those same kind of earnings.

With the over 10% of the cap crowd we get into a discussion regarding what a first tier quarterback is. In Caponomics, I define the first tier as between 10 and 13% of the cap, but with the understanding that many teams will breach that 13% of the cap ceiling as that’s just the way the quarterback market works. Like I also point out in the book though, only one Super Bowl quarterback was over 13% in Steve Young at 13.08% on a 1994 49ers team that had a little more cap space to work with as they re-signed 17 veterans in December 1993 to skirt the new salary cap rules coming into affect. The second highest cap hit for a quarterback was Peyton Manning at 12.21% in 2015 for the Broncos with his brother Eli being number three at 11.75%. Going down the list the only other quarterbacks to win at over 10% of the cap were on teams that had Hall of Fame level quarterbacks as the list expands to include Tom Brady, Brett Favre, and Drew Bledsoe in 2001 when Brady took over.

When deciding on whether a quarterback is a first tier player, he should be someone who has a stat line that reflects something similar to these metrics: 65% completion percentage, 7.5 yards per attempt, 260+ yards per game with the ability to go for 350 to 400 yards in a game if necessary like facing a great rush defense that stops your rushing offense, 30 touchdowns, and 10 to 12 or less interceptions. In my opinion, from Caponomics, “first tier quarterbacks should only be quarterbacks that a team would pick very few others, if any, over–they should be exactly what the team is looking for with what they’re trying to do on offense and who can elevate the play of the offense around them.” These players have to be elite because, by spending first tier money on them, they need to be elite for your team to compete unless the front office has gone on a streak of finding value to make up for the value suck an average quarterback at 12% of the cap can be.

I quote Jason in Caponomics with his assessment of the quarterback market after Matt Stafford’s record setting contract. Jason writes, “the salary cap is supposed to promote some type of competitive balance in the league. Generally, if you spend highly on one position it should mean that you have an area of weakness at another. The most expensive position has always been the quarterback, so if someone has a great quarterback they should have to break the bank for that player. It should create a system in which the team with the so-so quarterback has extra cap dollars (and dollars in their actual cash budget) to spend on other players to try to counteract the great quarterback” they’re competing against. There are quite a few teams who have been dragged either into the first tier with non-first tier quarterbacks or teams with first-tier quarterbacks who have to pay them 15% of the cap, when better quarterbacks are making less. This creates a situation where they don’t have the same opportunity to make up for that player being a lesser player through creating advantages elsewhere.

As Michael Holley writes in Belichick & Brady, Belichick realized when he came to the Patriots that “the skill wasn’t just in acquiring good players anymore. It was an athlete/asset puzzle now.” This is why the Patriots have sustained this dynasty forever past the fact that Brady’s an elite quarterback. Throughout Belichick’s tenure they’ve let players go before they got too expensive and replaced them with less expensive, but still productive players who gave them much more value from a salary cap perspective. A player who produces seven sacks and 55 pressures against the quarterback for 2% of the cap is more valuable than the perceived elite edge defender who produces 11 sacks and 65 pressures for 9% of the cap. This concept is precisely why they were comfortable trading away Chandler Jones before earning their fifth Super Bowl in 2016. It’s my hope, and I believe it’s the hope of Jason, that the league starts to trend towards having some of these less productive players at a lower-cost, so the league can see more of a competitive balance with more than just these two main spending strategies for success with the expensive quarterback and the rookie contract quarterback model. This would also clear space for some of that money to go to other veteran players, which is a good thing considering that 17% of total salaries in the NFL in 2016 went to just 50 players and about 50% of the money goes to just 150 players, which is about 12% of the total league population, according to Jason Fitzgerald here at Over The Cap. With 17 quarterbacks on contracts currently over $20 million a year, much of that money is going to quarterbacks.

The second tier of the quarterback market is defined in Caponomics as being between six and ten percent of the cap and it’s the kind of quarterback who is a clear step below that first tier, like a Blake Bortles, which got me excited to see his extension slip him down right under this tier to expand the Jaguars window of success. This category of player is loosely defined by this kind of stat line: 61 or 62% completion percentage, 7.0 to 7.2 yards per attempt, 235+ yards per game, and a slightly worse touchdown to interception ratio than first tier quarterbacks. Bortles’ 2017 exemplifies this with a line of 60.2% completion percentage, 7.0 yards per attempt, and 230.4 yards per game with a 21 to 13 ratio.

Even Dan Snyder seems to be noticing the need to lower costs at the quarterback position as Alex Smith was signed to a contract that will keep him under 11% of the cap over the next three seasons, which isn’t second tier costs, but maybe my perceived second tier should be expanded to there considering the high costs so many are willing to pay over 13% of the cap. By going with Smith over Cousins, even with the trading of one of the top young cornerbacks in the NFL in Kendall Fuller with a third round pick, the Redskins may have given themselves some cap value and room to build out the roster. Looking at these next three years, the Redskins will save $5.6, $8.6, and $9.6 million in cap space versus if they paid Cousins the same amount he got in Minnesota and the Redskins still have Josh Norman and Quinton Dunbar at cornerback, so the position still has talent. Those millions in savings are enough to sign quite a few good players who could be key pieces that build out a better roster with Smith at the helm than what they would have had with Cousins.

In the coming years there are quite a few players who teams could, or should, find in the five to ten or eleven percent of the cap area. Smith is the top of this expanded market right now, which is what he’s seemed to always be, the top second level quarterback, which may have been a part of what led to him being in the same class as Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady for most wins since 2011. Maybe Smith’s slightly lower costs than the top of the quarterback market helped his teams field one or two more good players. Behind him, all five of the players currently in the five to ten percent of the cap group mentioned above should be there into the future, but it’s not that simple. Bortles, Keenum, and Bradford are on contracts that will bump past 10% at least in 2019, but they really haven’t proven to be first tier players at any point in their careers and teams would be best served extending them if they do well and hoping to keep them at a lower cost.

For example, if Bortles doesn’t prove himself to be better than he was in 2017 in these next couple seasons, then maybe both sides would be best served on a long-term deal that keeps him in the eight to eleven percent of the cap range for the foreseeable future because that version of Blake Bortles is only effective with an elite run game and defense, both of which Jacksonville has. Bortles is currently projected to consume 10.97% and 11.19% of the cap in the 2019 and 2020 seasons. He has a cap hit of $21 million in 2019 with just $5 million in dead money if he’s traded after June 1st in 2018 and $5 million in dead money if he’s traded or cut in 2020. This year and next year will be where the team makes their decision on what direction they want to go at quarterback dependent on his performance. If Bortles is the same player, then with so much young talent on the defense, I think they would look to continue to keep Bortles in a reasonable spending range or find another quarterback, rather than pay him first tier money.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see the team take Lamar Jackson if he’s there at the end of the first round because they might want to keep their options open and this would allow them to do that. It also makes Bortles expendable, which could help them get value back in a trade if they decide to go with Jackson to maintain this run-first, defensive model. Mobility at quarterback is a key factor in this run-first model because it adds another dimension to the offense if the quarterback isn’t producing at a high level passing. Remember, it was Bortles mobility that played a key role in helping them earn two playoff wins in January 2018 with 88 rushing yards to 87 passing yards against Buffalo, then some key rushes on the way to 35 rushing yards in the three-point win against the Steelers. In those two games he completed just 53.1% of passes for 301 total passing yards, so it’s not like a mobile rookie contract quarterback can’t produce at that level.

Teddy Bridgewater with the Jets and A.J. McCarron with the Bills are two players who are on contracts below 5% of the cap, but could be nice long-term pieces if they prove to be on that Bortles level this year and in the right situation for this five to ten percent range. They can both make their teams competitive if they play good defense. The Bills saw an opportunity to extend their window of using this run-first, defensive strategy with McCarron being just 1.69% of the cap in 2017, then a projected 2.7% in 2018.  He’ll help the team compete and provide a bridge to whoever they may draft in the first round this season.

Of the other current veterans, Eli Manning would be well served to take a page from the Brady and Patriots book on how to decrease cap hits, while maintaining reasonable earnings as he’s no longer a first tier elite player or at least he hasn’t been able to show us that behind a porous offensive line. He wasn’t very good in 2017 with Odell Beckham for only four games and he wasn’t very good throwing to anyone but Beckham in 2016 with a 105.3 passer rating when targeting him, but just a 78.9 passer rating when throwing to other receivers. If the Giants do keep Eli past 2018, it would have to be at a reduced rate and it could even be a favorable situation for both sides as he’s not in a position to be a 12 or 13% of the cap quarterback anymore, and having him closer to something like 8% of the cap might just extend his career and improve the team around him enough for him to compete again. Say Eli had a cap hit of $15 million in 2019 rather than his projected $23.2 million, that’s $8.2 million they have to improve the offense around him to elevate his play to a level he can’t create without a lot of help at this point in his career. Taking a lower cost in a player’s late-30s may actually extend the player and team’s window of opportunity to compete and continue to be paid. Getting paid $15 million to play quarterback at 42 is better than not getting paid $15 million if you still have the desire to play.

Cam Newton is on a first tier contract through 2020 with his last year being under 11% of the projected cap, but if he wants to extend his career past that he’s a very likely candidate to need to decrease to this tier to compete. He’s a big, mobile quarterback who isn’t very accurate and turns the ball over a little too much. He’ll be 32 years old in 2021 and, considering much of his value comes from running, I think his career is going to have a decline more similar to a running back than a quarterback’s career path. If he’s going to be on in the NFL past 2020, he’s not going to be worth 12% of the cap unless he drastically improves his accuracy and production in the passing game, but the team could be in a more competitive position and he could extend his career if he’s in the second tier. He will need to slightly improve his passing to deal with the rushing decline that will be coming eventually, but he’ll have the experience and intelligence necessary after a decade in the NFL to make the adjustments to his game. The Panthers are already built on a rushing based offensive strategy with a good defense, so Ron Rivera could continue to employ this strategy with him at a rate closer to 8% and the team could compete.

Joe Flacco could be perfect example of a second tier quarterback if he didn’t have the leverage after his Super Bowl win to catapult himself towards 14% and 15% of the cap each year on one of the NFL’s worst contracts from a value standpoint. In fact, his winning the Super Bowl was probably the single most impactful factor in today’s quarterback market. Through his first five seasons, he had a completion percentage of 60.5% with 7.1 yards per attempt and 220.4 yards per game. His seasonal touchdown-to-interception ratio was 20-to-11. That’s basically Blake Bortles 2017 season, so maybe he would have been signed to something closer to second tier value, maybe even below the 11% threshold for a few years and he could have been an Alex Smith type of value for the team. Instead, Flacco saw the richest deal in NFL history at the time and, considering who he is as a player, it essentially justifies the ever-increasing top of the market we see because every quarterback that comes into negotiations is justified in saying, “well look at what Flacco makes. I expect more than that.”

The Ravens could begin to plot their move on from him in 2019, then release or trade him in 2020. This will be his 35-year-old season, so if I were the team that traded for him, I’d try to extend him for a few years in this second tier area and make a run with him. All this said about Flacco’s contract, we all must still acknowledge the masterful job by the Ravens front office to continue to field a really good roster around him. We can’t fault them for paying him what they paid him: he was the franchise quarterback, he just earned the team their second Super Bowl, he was the first real franchise quarterback the organization had ever had with their first Super Bowl coming completely because of their defense, and he had a four-game playoff run with a 57.9% completion percentage, 1140 passing yards (285 yards per game), and 9.1 yards per attempt with 11 touchdowns and zero interceptions. There was nothing they could do but sign the guy and they’ve done a great job building their defense around that contract, they’ve provided a real example of how to draft and spend around that quarterback to extend a competitive window even with such a value suck.

Teams can still be successful spending over 10% of the cap on a quarterback, that’s clear, but as stated earlier, it has to be a high performing player with a well-constructed team around him. No matter how good a quarterback is, he still needs a great roster around him. That was a bit of the issue with Peyton Manning throughout his career as he cost an average of 13.35% of the cap from 2001 through 2015. By comparison, Brady only had one year that breached 13% of the cap, which was 2006, the year Manning cost 10.36% of the cap and edged past the Patriots in the AFC Championship by a 38-34 score. Throughout his career, Manning was on teams slanted towards playing offense, while Brady was on more complete rosters. From 1998 through 2015, Manning’s defenses were on averaged ranked 15th in the NFL in points allowed at 21.6, while Brady’s defenses from 2001 through 2016 averaged 18.6 points allowed per game, which ranked about eighth. When you spend more on the quarterback, he must be an elite player, but many teams aren’t paying that kind of money to truly elite players.

I can’t blame teams for paying their franchise quarterbacks. The NFL is a win now league with the potential for being fired a year after you’re hired if things aren’t working out, which is a difficult position to be in for any general manager or head coach who just secured his dream job. There are a handful of quarterbacks over 10% of the cap in 2018 who might not be that kind of elite quarterback though like Joe Flacco, Derek Carr, Eli Manning, Cam Newton, and the unproven Jimmy Garoppolo. Again, not blaming teams for spending this way, whether you have an elite quarterback or not, leads to a situation where there has become a real opportunity for teams that hit on their rookie contract quarterbacks to compete for Super Bowls with more complete rosters than these high spending opponents. As noted in Caponomics, my sister and her classmates at McCombs Business School at the University of Texas did a regression analysis of every quarterback from 2011 through 2015 and found that 8.67% of the cap is a tipping point for quarterbacks where their cap hit can begin to affect their team’s chances of winning.

On the way to a Super Bowl, teams face multiple elite teams, all with their own strategies for success. Some of those teams have great offenses, some have great defenses, and some are great at everything like the 2016 Patriots and 2017 Eagles. If you don’t have a complete team that’s good in every phase of the game, you could run into an opponent that can drag you into the kind of game you can’t excel in or they might just be better than you across the roster. This is why the rookie contract quarterback strategy has become popular after seeing what the 2013 Seahawks and now the 2017 Eagles were able to create around good rookie contract quarterbacks with an elite rushing attack, great offensive line play, and defense with a pressure producing defensive line.

As I’ve said many times, if the game does come down to the quarterback position, then using money saved on a quarterback to invest in the defensive line, whose pressure can drastically decrease the performance of the opponent’s quarterback’s efficiency is a really strong strategy. Sam Monson from Pro Football Focus found that simply applying pressure to quarterbacks in 2016 dropped passer ratings from 96.7 to just 62.5 as a league-wide average. We remember how much pressure Peyton Manning was under in that Super Bowl victory for the Seahawks. In the NFC Championship Game against the Vikings, as I detailed here, the Eagles had two game changing plays because of pressure. Patrick Robinson had an interception returned for a touchdown because of Chris Long putting pressure on Case Keenum and hitting his arm to cause a floater to fall right into Robinson’s arms, which made the game 7-7. This was the Vikings second drive of the game after a nine play, 75-yard drive that made it 7-0 and looked easy– it was a real game changing play. The next game changing pressure was Derek Barnett’s sack-fumble with 3:25 left in the first half when it was 14-7 and the Vikings were on the Eagles 16-yard line driving to score. The Eagles recovered the fumble, went down field, made it 21-7, then hit a field goal before the half as well to make it 24-7. The Eagles got the ball at half, scored again to make it 31-7 and the Vikings were suddenly down 24 points, rather than seven, and had run just six plays since the fumble. This put them in a desperate position. They had to go for it on 4th and goal from the Eagles 7-yard line on the next drive, where they turned it over on downs, and the Eagles went down to make it 38-7 and the game was effectively over. Yes, Nick Foles played very, very well, but without those two turnovers created by pressure, it would have been a completely different game.

One of the big things about having a rookie contract quarterbacks is that if you can get near first tier performance levels, even second tier performance levels out of these quarterbacks on contracts that cost a maximum of four and a half percent of the salary cap, you’ve got an opportunity to get a similar performance to what others pay as much as 15% of the cap . This can lead to a scenario where the team is getting that production with as much as 10% of the cap more to spend on other positions. And to this point, there are quite a few 2018 contenders with rookie contract quarterbacks because of this and great talent around him. Six teams that jump off the page at you are the Eagles, Cowboys, Rams, Texans, Chiefs, and Titans with each of them making moves this offseason partially made possible because of the lower-costs they have at QB.

Just looking at these teams in terms of what they’re creating, the Eagles have maintained the roster that earned them a Super Bowl last year and may have even improved in some places. The Cowboys are basically still the same roster that went 13-3 in 2016 and would’ve made the playoffs in 2017 if Ezekiel Elliott wasn’t suspended for six games. The Rams were one of the best teams in football in 2017 at 11-5 and they’ve added Aqib Talib, Marcus Peters, Nickell Robey-Coleman, and Ndamukong Suh. They’ve gone from a pretty weak secondary to what may be the NFL’s best, while adding one of the best defensive tackles in the NFL to a team that may have the best in Aaron Donald. That’s the kind of improvement that teams can make with this low-cost under center, which is why they’ve become an early favorite to win the Super Bowl.

As an aside, Scott Barrett and I have had this conversation in recent weeks, a team’s play caller may be the second most important position on the field considering the jump we saw from Jared Goff from 2016 to 2017 with the addition of Sean McVay. Think of how good Matt Ryan was in 2016 compared to a slight decline in 2017 after Kyle Shanahan left for San Francisco. The importance cannot be understated.

Houston already had a great defense before injuries derailed them in 2017. The defense got them a playoff win after 2016 with Tom Savage at quarterback, so with Deshaun Watson under center in 2018, they’re in position to compete. They already had J.J. Watt, Jadeveon Clowney, Whitney Mercilus, and D.J. Reader creating pressure in the front seven, while they’ve added Tyrann Mathieu and Aaron Colvin to a defensive backfield that needed improvements, as it was one of their weaknesses in 2017. They signed three offensive linemen in Zach Fulton, Senio Kelemente, and Seantrel Henderson in an attempt to improve , while also adding an elite special teams player in Jonathan Bademosi to improve in the important and oft-forgotten third phase of the game.

The Chiefs are hoping to get the same production out of Patrick Mahomes they came to expect out of Alex Smith, but for 9.5% of the cap less, which allows them to make improvements like signing Sammy Watkins to a $16 million a year contract that will consume most of those savings. Tennessee keeps investing in their defense, at running back, and along the offensive line to build up a winnable formula with the mobile Marcus Mariota, setting up a situation where he’s not expected to throw for 270 yards a game for them to win because he might not be that player yet. They re-signed right guard Josh Kline, then added cornerback Malcolm Butler, and running back Dion Lewis. They re-signed 3-4 defensive end DaQuon Jones for a reasonable $7 million a year after the career year he was having was cut short by injury.

Of course, there are quite a few teams with top paid quarterbacks who are among the top contenders like the Patriots, Steelers, Chargers, Packers, Vikings, Falcons, Panthers, Saints, Seahawks, and maybe even the upstart 49ers, but these two distinct strategies have created a real opportunity for teams with rookie contract quarterbacks as they can get similar production levels for as much as 10% of the cap less than others. Teams have an easier road to turning their organization around with the right pick at quarterback under this CBA than the previous one as rookie contract quarterbacks were getting out of control, so this is a big win for all sides in the previous CBA. The dynamic of these two strategies will continue to play out until more teams can create a viable alternative in between the two, but for now, these are the main ways in which to perceive how most teams are built. Are they investing heavily at quarterback and basing their strategy for success around the quarterback and do they have the potential savings and low-cost, but productive players elsewhere to make up for his high costs and develop a complete roster? Or do they have a quarterback on his rookie contract and have they made the moves around him to build up the offense and defense in a way that helps elevate his play and the entire team’s performance?

The fact of the matter is that no matter what the team has at quarterback, Super Bowl champions have to be competent in every phase of the game, so the game comes down to who solves the athlete/asset puzzle the best. It’s up to each organization to identify their strategy, then make the moves to maximize their potential with this strategy by identifying the valuable players they can find to surround their quarterback whether through the draft or through free agency. The kind of spending you have at quarterback also influences this, meaning that if you have an expensive quarterback, you might then want to find the lower cost value on the defensive line like the Patriots do every year signing pressure producing defensive ends at a low-cost like Chris Long and now Adrian Clayborn. If you have a rookie contract quarterback like the 2017 Eagles , then you might want to invest almost 28% of the cap in your defensive line with a 2017 first round pick going to defensive end Derek Barnett as well.

The decision made at quarterback affects the decisions made around the rest of the roster in a variety of ways from the money available to the rest of the players to the kinds of players you’re going to want to invest in to achieve your strategy for success based on what you have at quarterback, so choose wisely and create a situation that has the highest probability of success for the on-field strategy that you’re employing. Understanding the spending at quarterback creates the framework for understanding how teams spend along the rest of the roster, so this provides at least a starting point for analyzing how each team is constructed.

Zack Moore is a writer for OverTheCap.com and author of the recently released book titled, “Caponomics: Building Super Bowl Champions,” which is now available on Amazon. You can follow him on Twitter @ZackMooreNFL. 

Jaguars Trying to Emulate the Strategy of the 2013 Seahawks

As I was writing Caponomics: Building Super Bowl Champions, which is now available on Amazon (paper edition/kindle), I realized there are two distinctly different styles of constructing a championship roster.

The first roster construction strategy is the obvious one, investing in a top tier quarterback, which means over 10% of the cap, and thus creating, by default, a quarterback centric roster due to the large investment. This is the most used strategy in the NFL with 15 teams with quarterbacks over 10% of this year’s $167 million salary cap.

The second strategy is to invest in a rookie contract quarterback and build a complete roster around him with the hopes that the rookie contract quarterback will perform at a reasonably efficient level to help guide that team to a Super Bowl. While the Eagles had 11.12% invested in Wentz including dead money charges to Chase Daniel and Sam Bradford and the Bears were at 11.54% with Mike Glennon and Mitch Trubisky, they still executed this kind of strategy that will allow them to take advantage of the rookie contract quarterback’s low cap numbers before they hit their second contracts. The Patriots have become such a deep roster over the last two seasons because of Tom Brady’s 8.87% cap hit in 2016 and his 8.38% cap hit in 2017 as the Patriots have adjusted for him being, theoretically, past his prime and paying him accordingly. During what we might consider prime years from ages 28 through 34, Brady averaged 10.94% of the cap.

Of the 12-playoff teams, those with quarterbacks over 10% of the cap are the Steelers, Chiefs, Vikings, Saints, Panthers, and Falcons. Those with top paid quarterbacks on rookie contracts are the Jaguars, Titans, Eagles and Rams. The Bills with Tyrod Taylor at 5.82% and Patriots with Brady are in this middle group of teams with veterans under 10%. The only other teams with a top paid quarterback who was still on their roster and making under 10% of the cap who weren’t on their rookie contract were the Jets, Bengals, Raiders, Bears, and 49ers.

The main blueprint that teams may be following for a quarterback centric team model is the 2006 Colts team that had 10.36% invested in Peyton Manning, then 16.25% of the cap invested in their starting offensive line with 6.77% consumed by left tackle Tarik Glenn and 4.71% in right tackle Ryan Diem. This team also had 6.27%, 5.00%, and 3.39% invested in their top three receivers of Marvin Harrison, Reggie Wayne, and Brandon Stokley with the investment in the line and pass catchers intended to help the team win shoot outs with a sub-par defense.

The blueprint that teams using the rookie contract strategy is the 2013 Seahawks who had just 4.49% of the cap invested in their quarterback position with 0.55% invested in second-year quarterback Russell Wilson and Matt Flynn consuming 3.25% of the cap with his dead money cap hit. They used the money saved at quarterback to invest in a starting offensive line that cost 18.59% of the cap with left tackle Russell Okung at 7.76%, right guard James Carpenter at 1.69%, Max Unger at 4.88% in the middle, right guard JR Sweezy as the bargain at 0.40%, and right tackle Breno Giacomini at 3.86%. (As they transitioned into the second contracts of the stars that made up the core of that team on rookie contracts their investment in the offensive line decreased and we’ve seen the consequence of that as Wilson is routinely running for his life and they can’t create a conventional rushing attack.) They also invested in pass catchers like tight end Zach Miller at a Super Bowl record 8.94% of the cap, who was also a good run blocker, and wide receivers Sidney Rice at 7.89%, and Percy Harvin at 3.98%. One could argue that all three of those investments were poor, but in principle they were reasonable considering the low-costs at quarterback, the ability of good receivers to elevate a young quarterback, and the successful experience of the two receivers in Darrelle Bevell’s West Coast system when he was previously in Minnesota.

The key of that Seahawks team was their ability to run the football with an elite defense that excelled against the pass. With the savings at quarterback, as well as an elite cornerback group on rookie contracts consuming just 3.70% of the cap, they also invested heavily in their defensive line to the tune of a Super Bowl record 28.18% of the cap. With shut down defensive backs, this created a defense that gave up a league leading 172 passing yards per game and 4.8 net yards per pass attempt.

This is the cap construction example that the Jaguars have been clearly following over the past few years with Blake Bortles on his rookie contract and their quarterback group consuming 6.0% of the cap. Like that Seahawks team the Jaguars have 27.0% of the cap invested in their defensive line with big money cap hits being Malik Jackson at 9.28%, Calais Campbell at 6.29%, Dante Fowler, Jr. at 3.84%, Marcell Dareus at 3.43%, and Abry Jones at 2.40%. They’re assisted by a cap rollover that has extended their salary cap to about $206.5 million, which makes Jackson’s cap hit of $15.5 million only 7.5% of this higher cap figure. Similarly, the Seahawks had Chris Clemons at 6.64%, Red Bryant at 6.18%, Brandon Mebane at 4.23%, Michael “Man of the Year” Bennett at 3.90%, and Cliff Avril at 3.05% as a means of creating pressure on the quarterback.

Investments across the defensive line allow for teams to have a depth of pressure producers that allow for the team to play these linemen a lesser percentage of snaps that allows them to keep their legs fresh throughout the game and throughout the season. It may be a trend that the Seahawks helped popularize in 2013 with eight players playing between 46 and 58% of snaps. That’s a surprising stat at first glance, but it’s even more surprising when considering the amount of money they invested in players with two players over six percent of the cap and five over three percent. When a team invests heavily in a player, common logic would indicate they intend on them playing almost every snap, but that was not the case with this Seahawks team as they were able to make those kinds of investments because of their savings on many core rookie contract players.

The best pass rushing team in the NFL this year was another team that has executed well during their starting quarterback’s rookie contract, the Eagles. According to Sam Monson of Pro Football Focus, “the Eagles defense finished the year with 41 more total pressures than any other unit. Only team to generate pressure on more than 40% of passing plays.” As he aptly points out with Wentz down, “this is what can win them playoff games.” That Eagles team finished the season with seven players playing between 40 and 65% of snaps, which equals a depth of talent and fresh legs. I liked a Jon Gruden metaphor from October while he watched the Eagles: the fresh legs are like having relief pitchers with blazing fastballs. While the starting pitcher may wane in the later innings, the relievers can come in with fresh, powerful stuff.

The Jaguars didn’t have the same kind of spread of snaps, but the signing of Dareus was likely a part of a push to make them more balanced in this way. Over the course of the season Calais Campbell, Yannick Ngakoue, and Malik Jackson all played between 73 and 78% of snaps, Abry Jones played 46.96% and Dante Fowler, Jr. played 44.83%, while Dareus has played between 43.5% and 66.2% of snaps in his last seven games for the team.

I don’t have the Pro Football Focus metrics or the total pressures for the 2013 Seahawks, but they were eighth in the NFL with 44 sacks and the 2017 Jaguars were second with 55. Some of those Jaguars linemen played a lot of snaps for good reason: Campbell had 14.5 sacks, Ngakoue had 12.0, while Jackson and Fowler both had 8.0.

With the low costs at quarterback, teams with rookie contract quarterbacks are able to invest in a defense with an equation in mind. The idea is that their rookie contract quarterback won’t be in the position to carry a team to victory over the course of the season, unless they become a Wentz or DeShaun Watson type of player early in their career. Working under the premise that quarterback is the most important position on the field, the goal of these teams is to create a defense that decreases the opponent’s quarterback to the point where your “lesser” quarterback can outperform that elite quarterback you’re facing in the playoffs. Most importantly, with a good rushing attack and defense, the team is looking for their “lesser” quarterback to be more efficient.

The Super Bowl between the Seahawks and Broncos was a good example of this. Peyton Manning completed 34 of 49 passes (69.4%) for 280 yards with one touchdown and two interceptions, while Wilson went 18 for 25 (72.0%) for 206 yards and two touchdowns, but most of Manning’s production came toward the end of the game after it was already decided. While Manning threw for just 5.7 yards per pass attempt, Wilson recorded a much more efficient 8.2 yards per attempt. While the Wilson led Seahawks were ranked 26th in the NFL in passing yards in 2013, they were sixth in the NFL in net yards per attempt at 7.0, which illustrates some of that efficiency across the year. They didn’t ask Wilson to carry them, but because of the running game they had, it helped him elevate his play to a very efficient level.

For the Jaguars, Blake Bortles does not provide the same kind of efficiency that Wilson provided, but they did average over 20 more passing yards per game than that Seahawks team. They did have a higher performing offense with 366 yards per game compared to 339 for Seattle; they even ran for more yards per game at 141 compared to 137 as the NFL’s best rushing offense in 2017. The Jaguars defense is about on the same level as the Seahawks’ teams, but have a weakness as the NFL’s 21st ranked rushing defense, which they worked to fix with the trade for Dareus. The Jaguars were fifth in points scored with 26.1 per game and second in points allowed at 16.8. The Seahawks were eighth in points scored with the same rate of 26.1 per game and first in points allowed at 14.4.

Jacksonville has done a solid job replicating a strategy that worked before for that Seahawks team on the defensive line and on the back-end with shutdown corners and top performing linebackers. According to Pro Football Focus, the Jaguars three linebackers were all ranked in the top 30 players at the position with Telvin Smith ranked 7th, Paul Posluzny ranked 15th and Myles Jack at #30. Their cornerbacks are undoubtedly the best combination in the NFL with Jalen Ramsey ranked second with a 92.2 overall rating and free agent addition AJ Bouye ranked fifth at 90.4. Aaron Colvin is a pretty good slot cornerback as the 57th ranked cornerback overall with the 14th best passer rating against him in the slot at 86.8. The organization smartly signed two free agents at safety, one of the most affordable and longer lasting positions in the NFL, with Tashaun Gipson as the 11th ranked safety and Barry Church ranked 21st.

One issue that may come for the Jaguars in this playoff run is Bortles being less efficient than Wilson and Leonard Fournette, the powerful and high performing rookie, being less efficient than we’re led to believe by his traditional stats. As Scott Barrett pointed out on Twitter, if we remove his two longest runs of the season, Fournette would average just 3.29 yards per carry. Since October 19th, Forunette has averaged only 3.22 yards per carry. Barrett writes that, “both figures would rank last among all 32 running backs to see at least 150 carries.”

If Fournette, Chris Ivory, TJ Yeldon and Corey Grant can produce in the playoffs, this is a very dangerous team as Bortles can be relied on to perform at an average level and the team could win with their strategy for success. Those running backs combined for 742 receiving yards this year as well, which is another efficient and reliable way to move the ball. Bortles completed 60.2% of passes this year, had 7.0 pass yards per attempt, and 230.4 yards per game. There was some talk of Bortles “elite” play during December as he had a four week run where he completed 68.8% of passes for 9.11 yards per attempt and 321 yards per game with 9 touchdowns to 3 interceptions—but that was against a Colts defense ranked 28th against the pass, a Seahawks defense without Richard Sherman and Kam Chancellor, a Texans defense derailed by injures and ranked 24th against the pass, and a 49ers defense ranked 22nd. He fell down to Earth with a 44.1% completion percentage, 158 passing yards, and two interceptions against a Titans defense in Week 17 that was ranked 25th against the pass. Bortles did have 322 rushing yards, which is another added dimension that could prove helpful as a quarterback with added mobility can extend drives on third down and extend plays in the redzone to find the open man.

Their wide receiver group is a group that isn’t talked about much, but which could be an x-factor in the playoffs as with Dede Westbrook and Allen Hurns now both healthy with Keelan Cole and Marqise Lee; they go into the playoffs with four receivers who averaged over 46 receiving yards per game. This is all without their assumed number one receiver Allen Robinson going down in week one with a torn ACL. Jacksonville has multiple players who could create advantageous match-ups for Bortles over the course of the playoffs. How much better could this Jaguars team be if Robinson was healthy? Although, that’s not a “what if” game that can be played in a league where everyone has suffered some kind of serious injury. How good could the Chiefs be if Eric Berry was healthy? What about the Patriots if Dont’a Hightower wasn’t on the IR? How would the Steelers defense look if Ryan Shazier was healthy?

With all of that said about their offense, this is a team that is going to need their defense to perform to the best of their abilities during the playoffs. I can’t foresee the Jaguars winning a Super Bowl if they’re forced to score 21 or more points in the four games. They’re going to need a performance like the 2013 Seahawks defense who gave up 15 points to the Saints in the Divisional Round, 17 points to the 49ers in the Conference Championship and just 8 points against a Broncos offense that was the league’s best and performed at a historic pace. Bortles and the offense are also going to have to play turnover free football and the defense is going to have to force some. They were 19th in the NFL with 23 turnovers, but second with 33 takeaways. The 2013 Seahawks were fourth in turnovers with 19 and the best in the league with 39 takeaways, a trend they continued in the playoffs with just one turnover and eight takeaways.

We’ll see over the next few weeks if the Jaguars can replicate the strategy the Seahawks used to win their Super Bowl. If they don’t, they may have to try to win with Bortles on the fifth-year of his rookie contract, making over 10% of the projected $179.5 million salary cap as a non-elite quarterback. With the cap rollover, they will still have over $16 million in cap space heading into the 2018 offseason, so they could still compete with this model. Key free agents, though, will be inside linebacker Paul Posluszny, wide receivers Marqise Lee and Allen Robinson, guard Patrick Omameh, and cornerback Aaron Colvin, so there will be holes to fill. We’ll see if one of the more analytics-focused front offices in the NFL is able to keep this success going.

Zack Moore is a writer for OverTheCap.com, author of the upcoming book titled, “Caponomics: Building Super Bowl Champions,” and NFLPA Certified Agent. You can follow him on Twitter @ZackMooreNFL.

Evaluating the Bills and Eagles Trade

The second Bills trade of the day saw the team move starting cornerback Ronald Darby to the Eagles for wide receiver Jordan Matthews and a 3rd round draft pick.  Unlike the Rams trade I don’t think there is much debate that this is a trade that is good for both sides and makes sense both for this season and the future. Continue reading Evaluating the Bills and Eagles Trade »

Bills Extend Marcell Dareus for $100 Million over Six Years

Count me among the stunned, but the Bills have locked up defensive tackle Marcell Dareus for the next six years for $100 million and $60 million guaranteed. While the fully guaranteed portion of the contract is not yet known, given the Bills history with some of these bigger deals and their cap situation I would expect the $60 million to be virtually guaranteed and likely all paid out by 2018. The re-signing of Dareus will give the Bills a super-unit in terms of cost with Dareus paired up with Mario Williams ($16M), Kyle Williams ($10M) and Jerry Hughes ($9M) in what will be one of the most, if not the most, expensive rush units ever.  Continue reading Bills Extend Marcell Dareus for $100 Million over Six Years »

Eagles to Trade McCoy to Bills for Alonso

According to ESPN’s Adam Schefter, the Philadelphia Eagles, who seem to be in the midst of a firesale, have agreed to trade star running back LeSean McCoy to the Buffalo Bills in exchange for linebacker Kiko Alonso.

This move is a major win for the Eagles. McCoy was set to count against the Eagles cap at $11.95 million while earning a $10.25 million salary. Neither number should ever occur for a running back in today’s NFL and it is possible that McCoy would have been released had he refused a pay cut. If the Eagles had released him they would have owed McCoy $1 million, the amount of his salary that was guaranteed for the year. Instead they get a young linebacker in return who will earn $795,946 for the season. This will clear about $7.75 million from the Eagles salary cap this season.

For the Bills they will now take on $10.25 million in cap and cash obligations for McCoy, essentially eating up 1/3 of their projected cap room. One would expect the Bills to immediately rework his contract for more cap relief. McCoy has three years remaining on his contract. He will earn a total of $15 million in the final two years of his contract, though none of that is guaranteed. I would expect the team to add two more seasons to the deal to maximize the cap savings.

It is a large price to pay for a running back especially one who struggled at times in two of the last three seasons when his offensive line played poorly. The Bills offensive line is a trouble spot for the team and they will need to upgrade significantly to make this work. The Bills declined usin the franchise tag on pass rusher Jerry Hughes, which may have been an indication that the money was needed for the offense. The team already signed Richie Incognito to play guard, but arguably need three more lineman to allow the running game to excel.

The move will likely mark the end of CJ Spillers career with the Bills and could spell the end of veteran Fred Jackson’s. Releasing Jackson would save the team $2.7M in cap room. Spiller is a free agent.

No trade can be made official until the first day of the NFL League Year so its possible that the trade could never happen if someone gets cold feet, but it sure sounds like it will happen.  The Eagles will have well over $40 million in cap space to use to improve the team and should be expected to be a big player in free agency.

Week 3: Which Teams Get the Most out of Their Salary Cap

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With three weeks of the NFL season behind us I thought it might be fun to compare salary cap spending versus performance. I keep my own team efficiency rankings, but they are based on scoring and strength of schedule and quite frankly not very reasonable at this stage of the season (for instance the Bills rank 2nd because they have faced 3 teams that have given up next to no points while the Bills are averaging 21+ a game and those numbers will even out once their schedule normalizes somewhat), so for this exercise I wanted to use Pro Football Focus’ data. Perhaps another time we will use some numbers from Football Outsiders.

I don’t like reprinting data from other sites and I usually like to use the data to come up with different numbers anyway so that was what I did here, so if you want to see the actual PFF grades you will need to subscribe to PFF.  PFF scores teams in a number of offensive, defensive, and special teams categories. They usually give them equal weight sum them up and come up with an aggregate score for a team. I wanted to weight the categories with the passing categories having a weight of 56% and rushing categories 44%. These numbers simply represent the league wide play selection in 2012.  I added 20% of the penalty grade assigned to each team to calculate an offensive and defensive score.  A total grade was calculated by adding offense, defense, and special teams with the weights 42.5, 42.5, and 15.

I wanted to plot those scores against salary cap spending for the season and then add another dimension- unused cap space. So the following chart plots the score against spending with the bubble size representing unused cap room. A smaller bubble indicates minimal unused room while a larger one indicates significant unused dollars.

week 3 cap performance chart

I admit I was a bit surprised at the results in that no low spending teams really broke through in the early stages of the season. The Chiefs, Broncos and Seahawks all have significant salary cap charges on the season. The Cowboys, Saints, and Panthers are all high payroll teams that have deferred significant costs to 2014 and beyond.

One of the more interesting teams could be Green Bay. The Packers offense is terrific. Under this grading criteria its just a few decimal points behind that of the Broncos, but their defense is 4th worst in the NFL.  While they are not a team to spend heavily in free agency you have to wonder if they could have perhaps upgraded somewhere in that defense to improve their rankings.

The flipside of that is that the Packers have a pretty good team and will be able to carry over money next season to help them improve or maintain their roster in the future. The Patriots and Bengals would also fit in that same category. It’s probably the exact opposite for a team like the 49ers who is basically capped out and had to let some depth go this past year due to salary cap constraints.

Teams like the Raiders and Jets are actually impressive. The cap space is about average but both carry large amounts of dead money on the books and used almost all their cap resources to field what have at least been competitive teams.

Jaguars and to a lesser extent Bills fans probably have the most to gripe about in the early part of the year. Jacksonville is awful, maintains a high cap charge because of so much dead money but they still had tons of cap room to improve this team. To sit on that amount of cap space and be that bad has to rub a fan the wrong way. There had to be players out there that were at least upgrades, even in the short term than what they are currently presenting on the field. Carrying over huge amounts of cap space is all good, but eventually it gets to the point where it is so much it becomes useless.

The reason the Bills are a little different is because they decided to take a large cap hit in 2014 for former QB Ryan Fitzpatrick, so they will likely be using a good chunk of this cap room to cover for that charge. It’s still a nice amount of cap room they could have spent, but they at least have a purpose with their unused cap space.

As the season goes on I’ll so some more snapshots like this using various published criteria so if you have any sources you want me to consider using feel free to pass them along.

Follow @Jason_OTC

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Recapping The First Day of Cuts

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There are still about 500 moves that teams will make over the next few hours to bring their rosters down from 75 to 53, but many teams got to work yesterday, so lets review some of the action.

The Bills biggest moves on Friday came when they announced that they were placing WR Brad Smith and QB Kevin Kolb on season ending IR. I have seen many people mention that Kolb could retire or potentially take an injury settlement. Neither should occur. Kolb’s concussion was considered career threatening. By maintaining a spot on IR when the season completes Kolb is eligible for injury protection under the CBA because he is also under contract to Buffalo for the 2014 season. If Kolb’s injury from 2013 renders him unable to compete in 2014, 50% of his $2 million base salary is protected. He can earn another $1 million by simply being on the roster in week 17. If he accepts a settlement the Bills will be freed from this liability. If he voluntarily retires he will give up this payment and perhaps be asked to repay the Bills a $1 million dollar signing bonus. So it is in his best interests to maintain a presence even if all sides know he will never play again. Kolb lost a $250,000 roster bonus this year because he was placed on IR.

Smith had renegotiated his contract this season to improve his chances to make the team and I wonder if this will mark the end of his career. Smith was drafted in 2006 and was a good kick returner for the Jets while also filling in occasionally as “wildcat” QB. The Bills took a chance signing Smith feeling that he could do more and paid him accordingly, but, as is often the case, paying a specialist to become a complete player did not work. By no means was he guaranteed to make the team this season and it would be surprising if he was brought back next year. Smith has a $1.4 million base salary in 2014.

T Max Starks might have been the biggest name to be released yesterday when the Chargers gave him his walking papers. I had discussed Starks as a logical cut for San Diego because of the teams tight cap situation. Starks’ contract was only worth $1 million but it contained a large incentive that did count on the salary cap and pushed his charge over $2 million which made his cap number too high for the team. The sides could have removed the incentive, but the Chargers probably don’t see much benefit in paying him to be a backup.

The Seahawks released FB Michael Robinson because of salary cap concerns. He was another name I discussed and his $2.5 million dollar salary made him an easy target for release. I had speculated Heath Farwell could also be released due to cap concerns and he would be a name to potentially watch today when they make their final cuts. He is set to earn $1.5 million.

Arizona released a number of veteran players including special teamer Reggie Walker. Walker was set to earn $950,000 which may have been too much for a special teams ace. Arizona had around $6.5 million in cap room and while not a concerning amount it is likely under the mark the team would like to have. The release of a number of veterans saved the squad nearly $1 million in cap yesterday. The bigger concern for Arizona though was placement of their first round selection, Johnathan Cooper, on IR.

While these were the bigger name moves on the day there were many disappointed people yesterday who received their walking papers. Some were given hope of the Practice Squad while others were just clean cuts. Some teams will use practice to continue to evaluate and make decisions before the 4PM deadline today. For those who make it there will be a tremendous sense of accomplishment. Unfortunately the NFL is always moving and many of the players excited tonight will find out on Monday that the stay on the roster is short as another name hits the waiver wire and they are replaced before the season begins.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to keep up with the cuts on the website today, but by tomorrow we should get the rosters broken down into their final forms. The team web pages will look a lot different as will the real practice facilities which will look barren from all the summer names that were part of the NFL for a few months.

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