Eli Manning

A Fair Value for QB Aaron Rodgers

Posted on by Jason Fitzgerald

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With Aaron Rodgers supposedly deep in contract negotiations I thought it might be worth looking at what he should expect to make. I don’t want to bother going into statistics or anything like that. (If you want to read my piece on statistical measures to assign contract values you can click to it here). I just want to look at the marketplace and some trends and see where we go from here.

I think most people will agree that Rodgers is the best player in the game right now. He has the one Super Bowl win. He has the prolific passing numbers. The Packers are a great regular season team. When it comes to comparables for a contract the two players I want to look at are Peyton Manning and Drew Brees. Rodgers does not have the pedigree Manning had, with Manning being considered one of the all time great draft prospects and pretty much coming out of the gate firing. Rodgers sat for a few years behind Brett Favre before getting his opportunity and making the people of Green Bay forget about Favre. It took Brees some time as well to get going, though he had chances he just was not an exceptional player until late in his Charger run and then took it to another level when he hooked up with Sean Payton in New Orleans.

I want to try to find some trends with contracts when coming up with a fair market price for Rodgers. In my mind Joe Flacco should be looked at similarly to Ben Roethlisberger.  Roethlisberger signed an extension back in 2008 that was worth around $14.6 million a year in new money. It represented around a 5% increase in what Manning had earned per year in his $98 million dollar contract signed in 2004. Roethlisberger didn’t have the cache of Eli Manning, selected number 1 overall and with a famous last name, who would eventually go on to be the market setter at the position. Roethlisberger did have enough success, even when labeled as a perfect situation QB due to his franchise, to push the market at a young age. Though the market this year has been stagnant overall Flacco was able to push slightly past Brees and about 4.6% past Manning’s deal with the Denver Broncos.

With Flacco playing the Roethisberger role I want Rodgers to now take the position of either Manning or Brees. Manning’s  2011 contract represented an 18.3% raise over Roethlisbergers’ new money from 2008. Brees 2012 new deal was a 36% raise. That puts the APY for Rodgers between 23.7 and 27.3 million a season. Now I know that $27.3 million is unrealistic and looking at Flacco’s contract I tend to think that the Brees number is looked at as somewhat of an outlier. If we push Manning into the top slot at $19.2 million we come up with a high value of $25.1 million a season.

From the Packers point of view I think they will want to look at Flacco as Eli Manning in terms of a data point. Using Manning’s $16.25 million as the market setting base the Rodgers deal would then be $21.6 million at the low end and $23.7 million at the high end. Looking at those two sets of numbers I would say the logical “fair market value” is $23.7 million, representing the high end for the Packers and lowest acceptable level for Rodgers.

In some ways Rodgers bargaining would probably be helped if Matt Stafford or Matt Ryan had been able to accomplish what Flacco did. Since those players have a much higher pedigree I tend to think they would have made more than Flacco in a comparable situation. They would clearly be the Eli Manning. Flacco might be, but its definitely not clear that he is.

In fairness Rodgers is at a big disadvantage because he has two years remaining on his contract that the Packers can force him to honor, but he isn’t talking about holding out and I think Green Bay wants to get a fair deal done. I would think Rodgers rebuttal is that he is far younger than Manning was in 2011 and Brees in 2012 and you are paying for a player in his prime not coming out of it. It is also in the Packers best interest to make the move now to lessen the cap blows and possibility that the market does increase with Stafford and Ryan up for new deals soon, not to mention Eli and Ben in line for new contracts within the next 2 years.  It makes for a very tidy 4 year deal that gets Rodgers two important things- top of the market money now and a chance to be a free agent again at the age of 35, an age where top QBs are clearly going to still make massive amounts of money barring a market correction.

Remember that if the Packers agree to a $23.7 million dollar deal they will also roll into it the 2 remaining years at $20.75 million. From the Packers point of view a 4 year extension is going to technically be a 6 year contract for about $19.26 million, which for salary cap purposes helps them greatly. Given the Packers current cap situation they can pack away over $20 million in cap dollars on Rodgers without issue. He already counts for just under $10 million and using another $10 million is not an issue. For the Saints, who paid Brees $40 million in year 1 the cash to cap ratio was 3.85:1. For Flacco it will be 4.4:1. These are cap killers for a team in the future. The Packers can probably be close a 2:1 ratio which is extremely beneficial for long term planning.

So it just seems like a deal that should make sense to happen for both sides right around that $24 million a year mark. Both sides I think gain from making the move now rather than letting it hang out there and hang over the head of the team and the player. Rodgers gets his injury protection and a chance at one more payday down the line while the Packers get their guy on a relatively cap friendly contract.

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Value Pricing the NFL QB

Posted on by Jason Fitzgerald

One of the things I have often done on my other website is work on something that I call “value price” analysis of positions. Essentially what I do is come up with different metrics, some existing and some my own, to create models in which we reassign market values throughout the league to various players. If you prod around the other site you’ll see models for pass rushers, quarterbacks, running backs, offensive linemen, and a few other items here and there. Today I wanted to touch on a new valuation for Quarterbacks.

Now before we start there are a few things to keep in mind. One is that these discussions are just to spur debate among readers to come up with new and different ways to merge the salary cap with analytics, two things that should go hand in hand. Two they are just based on one year of data whereas pure contracts should be based on a minimum of two if not three years. Third this will probably be long so feel free to skip to the charts and conclusion.

The Metric

In my prior work with QB’s I have looked at numbers from Football Outsiders, Pro Football Focus, NFL.com and my own Percent of Offense stat. I wanted to take a different approach this time and come up with a pure number from game data. The primary metric is derived from Pro Football Focus. PFF tracks for QBs success based on actual length of pass in the air. It is powerful data. For example a player who throws primarily down the field is only expected to complete around 35% of his passes while those who live short should complete nearly 73%. So what I have done is translate these numbers into expected vs actual performance, a metric I call incremental yards.

To illustrate the way this works we will use Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers. Rodgers threw 75 passes that did not travel past the line of scrimmage and they resulted in 0 interceptions and 413 yards. The average QB would have thrown for 434 yards and 0.48 picks. In this category we say Rodgers incremental effect on the game was -21 yards and a reduction of 0.48 picks. From 0-9 yards Rodgers was  268, 1908, and 3. The average QB would have been 1661 and 4.9, meaning Rodgers produced 247 incremental yards and reduced picks by 1.9. You should get the idea from here. We do the same for passes that travel 10-20 yards and 20+ and add them all together to determine that Rodgers produced 4,295 yards on a set of passes that an average QB last year would have passed for 3,906.7. So he added an additional 388.3 yards of passing offense to the team.

That handles the passing category but with so many QBs in the league now being used as runners we need to find out their benefit in that area as well. For that we turn to Yahoo where we calculate an average YPA, 4.28, for our QB field  and apply it to the attempts to calculate their run differentials. Robert Griffin ran for 815 yards on 120 attempts. The average QB would have run for 514 yards, giving RGIII a positive effect of 300.9 yards, which is outstanding.

You will also notice above that I mention interceptions which means I need to compensate for turnovers. We have the interception total now we just need to calculate fumbles lost. Again going back to Yahoo we can determine that our QB set lost 116 fumbles last season. To convert that to fumbles per play I use a “playmaker” base. The playmaker base is the amount of times a QB has the ball in his hands to make a play. This is dropbacks + run attempts – scrambles. Using that we say that a player should lose a fumble 0.59% of the time he has a playmaker opportunity. Football outsiders charts drive stats and has the average drive at 30.85 yards.  So every time our QB turns the ball over we are losing 30.85 yards. This rewards a player like Tom Brady who may not have the greatest passing numbers but never turns the ball over.  Brady threw 8 picks and lost 0 fumbles in 688 playmaker opportunities. He should have fumbled away 4.1 balls and thrown 16.3 picks. So his effect on the game is 383.1 yards saved just by turnovers alone.

The Results

Now there are two ways to look at this stat. One is the cumulative number which rewards players for 16 games and hurts those who were benched or injured. The second way is to break it down into yards per playmake opportunity. The following chart illustrates the each players total contribution, yard per chance contribution, and increase over the expectation for the player.

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RGIII graded out as far and away the most productive player in the NFL. If you threw another QB into that system and asked him to do what RGIII would be asked to do he would produce 919 less yards. Cam Newton was a distant second while Brady, Rodgers, and Manning round out the top 5. Interestingly enough Colin Kaepernick who did not play nearly the same amount of time as the other players ranked 6th.

The most average QB in the game was Josh Freeman while Eli Manning, generally regarded as elite because of his playoff success put up negative yards on the year. Most agreed that Manning had a down season and these stats lend credence to that. One of the more interesting numbers came from Joe Flacco who is now the highest paid player in the NFL. He produced -59.5 yards on the year, 17th on our list of 38 QBs.

And it would be no surprise to see the bottom of the barrel being Mark Sanchez of the Jets. Sanchez was essentially the anti-RGIII accounting for -786.1 yards compared to an average QB. That’s awful. Partially it is the Jets fault because no other team in the NFL would have allowed that to go on for 15 games. On a per play basis John Skelton was worse and got the hook.

When looking per play a few names stand out notably Alex Smith who ranked 4th in the NFL but was pulled in favor of Kaepernick, who was just outstanding.  The fact that two QBs performed so well in the 49ers system really points to how excellent of a job Jim Harbaugh did playing to the strengths of his players.  If Smith could do that for 16 games in Kansas City the Chiefs won’t regret those 2nd round picks one bit.

I also found Matt Staffords numbers to be eye opening. He puts up numbers but he also throws the ball a lot. Despite the weapons he isn’t having the success average players would in the same spots. Andrew Luck is also nowhere near the class of the other rookies at the moment.

Financial Modeling

The first thing I wanted to do was to set an overall market number for the league. The data was based on all QBs who took at least 25% of their teams snaps this year. 38 players qualified under that criteria. Of those 38 names 12 were new wage scale rookies and 1 (John Skelton) was a late round pick from 2010. Because their low APY’s skew the numbers I wanted them out of the equation. I also decided to pull out Josh Freeman and Joe Flacco (his old APY) since the mid round picks of the old CBA were paid well but not starter money like Matt Stafford or Matt Ryan received. Of the 23 that remained, 3 were signed to be backup QB’s (Brady Quinn, Chad Henne, and Matt Hasselbeck) so they were also pulled. I used the remaining names to calculate the average salary and consider that my baseline for an average player. The average was $13,018,895.

To me that means around the NFL they should be willing, if everyone was a veteran QB, to have a minimum leaguewide set aside of $416,579,040. Since we have an additional 6 players who qualified I wanted to add to the pool what I would consider average pay for a backup, which would be around $3 million a year. That brings the pool total to $434,579,040. Now I want to properly distribute that pool out to the players I evaluated.

In order to come up with a distribution I wanted to make two adjustments. The first was to make a pure scoring adjustment that would bring the lowest score up to 0, which would be the addition of 786.1 pts to everyones incremental score. I then wanted to ensure that the lowest point distribution would make up 0.345% of the pool, meaning their value would be equal to that of Brady Quinn’s $1.5 million, the lowest that a team would pay for a viable backup. Here are the pay listings.

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A few things immediately jump out. One is how good the young player pool in the NFL currently is. In part that is due to the running ability of the players and there is a question as to how long they can keep that up.  But if you can get that production from them early it is incredible value to have a player on a contract that pays him $5 million or less a year when he would be earning closer to $20 million as a free agent.

Joe Flacco really demonstrates the importance of the playoffs to a young QB. As a regular season QB he was a below average passer and run performer. He was safe with the football which is why he has a game manager label. But when you perform on the big stage teams can overvalue it. Now he has to prove everyone wrong and improve on what he did this year. If not he has a chance of being the most overpaid player in the NFL

Now on the downside numbers I would never expect teams to sign some of these players for these amounts. In theory I would think that any veteran player with negatives across the board would be relegated to backup duty or simply put out of the NFL. No team should pay Carson Palmer $10 million simply because there is no upside to his game anymore. Maybe if you put him on a decent team the salary fits but on a squad like the Raiders it simply doesn’t. Cassel, Fitzpatrick, and Sanchez should all be toast.

Conclusion

This is just one of many ways that we will in the coming months evaluate a marketplace of players. Nothing is perfect and this certainly isn’t either.  The NFL is all about moving parts and systems. Joe Flacco was somewhat above average throwing the ball down the field. Eli Manning was terrific in that metric, 2nd best in the league to Drew Brees. A player like Matt Schaub who grades overall higher was awful in that regard. The Ravens and Giants would have to change up their entire philosophies to sign a player like Schaub. But if you have a flexible front office stats like these can give you an idea not just of gameplanning to strengths but also putting your salary cap dollars in line with what performance you are getting on the field.

As always feel free to email any comments or just post them below. Ive been ultra busy lately but always try to respond whenever I get the chance.

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The Case for Joe Flacco Breaking the Bank

Posted on by Jason Fitzgerald

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At face value I admit the numbers sound crazy. Even after winning a Super Bowl and earning MVP honors it seems to be out of this world to think that Joe Flacco is worth $20 million a year. I mean Flacco has yet to throw for 4,000 yards in a season. He has never thrown for 30 TD’s. For the most part he was considered a caretaker of a team that featured Ray Rice running the football and wanted a QB that would not put the defense in a bad position on the field. Just last year his own teammates seemed to wonder if he could carry them to the promised land.

Flacco’s case seems to be built on, even prior to the Super Bowl, was postseason success, regular season team wins, durability, and last minute comebacks. Why are these the main points of contention?  Because statistically he can not compare to the elite players in the NFL so he has to look at the softer factors when negotiating with the Ravens.   In some respects this is what happened with Mark Sanchez and the New York Jets who extended the QB based primarily on soft factors like team wins, playoff wins, and draft status. That’s not to compare Flacco and Sanchez. Flacco is Joe Montana compared to Sanchez. It’s just to illustrate a point of the only case that can really be made.

Flacco’s argument really centers around three contracts and three players. The first is Matt Schaub of the Houston Texans who Houston inexplicably gave a $62 million dollar extension to this past season. The annual value at $15.5 million a year puts him above Ben Roethlisberger and Phillip Rivers who were both considered infinitely better players, especially Roethlisberger who has been to three Super Bowls. At the time of Schaub’s extension he had been to the playoffs a grand total of 0 times. He was injured in 2011 and his lifetime record in Houston was 32-32. While Schaub did have one year where he led the NFL is passing yards that was a lifetime ago in 2009 and in general he was considered a caretaker QB and his limitations were badly exposed in the playoffs this season.

I think Schaub is clearly the market pusher for the position. He was different than a player like Kevin Kolb or even Sanchez in that Schaub was a known quantity when he signed. There was no remaining upside or downside. He is what he is, and normally you would expect that to be in $12-13 million a year range. The fact that they pushed the number as high as they did with almost half of the deal coming in the form of real guarantees is an eye opener and market mover. Immediately this jumps the market for Flacco by 20-30% because everyone now needs to adjust to the Schaub deal. So if you are saying to yourself that by no means should he earn more than Roethlisberger the Schaub 20-30% market correction jumps a Roethlisberger salary to between $17.6 and $19.1 million a year.  On its face it sounds crazy, but that’s the way the position is now headed salary wise.

Now that doesn’t push Flacco into the highest paid in the game category, but that is where the two other contracts come into play. The other players are Eli Manning and Ben Roethlisberger. Forget for a minute that Eli Manning has two Super Bowl MVPs and nearly threw for 5,000 yards in 2011. What we need to be focused on is what Eli Manning was not what he became. Same goes for Roethlisberger. When Manning signed his 6 year $97.5 million dollar contract back in 2009 he had only won one Super Bowl. He barely snuck over 4,000 yards and, in general was throwing for around 3,300 yards a year. He never threw 30 touchdown passes.

Big Ben was in a similar position. His near $88 million dollar deal that he signed in 2008 came as a QB who just once hit the 3,500 yard mark (and barely at that) and in two of his four years had not even reached 3,000 yards passing. He did have a Pro Bowl nod off his one 30+ TD season and he did win a Super Bowl in 2006, but, like Flacco, was considered something of a caretaker who was tough as nails that was able to make plays when it counted.

The important thing to note with these two players is the timeframe and what those contracts meant at the time. Eli’s brother, Peyton, almost universally regarded as the best QB in the game, was earning $14 million a year. Tom Brady was making $12.1 million. Donovan McNabb made $12.1. Brett Favre I believe was at $12.5 million and Kurt Warner was at $11.5 million.  Drew Brees was only at $10 million and Donovan McNabb was just under $9.1.  Favre and Warner were both well into their careers, but the other players were more or less on their first real money, post rookie contracts, similar to the position Eli and Ben found themselves in in 2008 and 2009 respectively.

When Eli and Ben signed, Peyton and Brady had 4 Super Bowl wins between the two of them. McNabb had been to a Super Bowl and Brees was setting passing records in New Orleans. The four had 18 Pro Bowls nods among them when Roethlisberger signed and 20 when Manning signed. Maybe we don’t think about it as much now, but back then these were landmark contracts that pushed the market the same way that Flacco is looking to push the marketplace.

Roethlisberger’s contract represented an increase of 4.75% in new money APY over Peyton Manning’s contract at the time. Maybe some looked at that as more reasonable since Ben had two years remaining on his contract at the time making the effective value of the contract $102 million at $12.5 million a season. There was no such ambiguity when the younger Manning signed his contract. It represented a 17.9% increase in APY over his brother’s deal in new money and even if you took it as a 7 year contract and included the old money it was still a 7.14% increase in value. Even today nobody would dream of saying Eli is better than his brother. More clutch in the playoffs perhaps, but not better.

Now I have no idea if this is the argument that has been made behind closed doors to the Ravens, but if it has not been it should be because it’s the only logical way to justify such a pay for Flacco. Since the class of 2004 it has really been a series of misses so Flacco is going to represent the new market reset for a series of young QB’s and in that respect this contract is more important to other NFL Quarterbacks and Teams than just a number for Joe Flacco.

When Roethlisberger received his contract in 2008 he really set the floor for that generation of QB. It was that number that helped Eli and his team negotiate what ended up being a ceiling of sorts that was going to hold until the next successful prospect came up for renegotiation. Almost immediately after the ink was dry on Manning’s contract Rivers, who was statistically superior but failed to advance to a Super Bowl, signed a deal that fit in between the Manning and Roethlisberger deals. Over time the bigger name players surpassed the Eli contract to take their rightful place in the hierarchy but with Schaub and Michael Vick within breathing distance of Manning it’s clear that the market is ready for a reset.

Flacco’s contract is going to set a barometer for Matt Ryan and Matt Stafford, the next two big young guns to get their first real extensions, as well as Josh Freeman and Cam Newton.  Whether Flacco is the high mark or low mark is going to depend on if any of these other players can grab the postseason success Flacco has. If Ryan was to win a Super Bowl he would easily jump Flacco, but for now they all may be forced to play Rivers to Flacco’s Manning.

So from that perspective what Flacco is asking for is not that crazy. It’s happened before and will likely happen again. In the past there used to be outlandish rookie deals that made it clear that the market was ready to move, but with those out of the equation poor decisions like those with Schaub and Vick will be the new drivers that inform everyone the market is ready for change. Flacco performing well in the playoffs came at the perfect time and he is going to hit a big payday.

In looking at the top of the market we have Drew Brees making $20 million a year. Based on the Roethlisberger contract, that would put Flacco in line for a payday of $20.95 million a year. The Manning deal would push it to an enormous $23.57 million a year. I would think if the Ravens do give in it will come in closer to the $20.95 million number. When Manning signed there was already Roethlisberger’s deal to base something on. Manning also has a number of soft factors that work in his favor including his last name, draft position, and a bigger fanbase and market that pushes value. Flacco who plays in a smaller market and was never supposed to be a savior can’t meet those same soft factors that Manning had working for him.

Brees will earn $60,500,000 over the first three years of his contract, $40 million of which is fully guaranteed and most likely the full amount virtually guaranteed due to the large signing bonus that he received. The remainder of his contract will likely never be earned unless Brees maintains an extremely high level of play. Based on the Manning and Roethlisberger models Flacco should earn anywhere from $66-$70 million over the course of the first three years of the contract. How much is probably based more on cap needs for the Ravens than demands by Flacco. That is quite a haul and is going to make a new generation of young stars plus a generation of established stars, which includes Ben, Eli and Aaron Rodgers, chomping at the bit to get their last shot at free agency.

I think that does bring up an interesting point that teams may need to confront in the near future and that is the overly heavy investment in the QB position which has the potential to get extremely high if Flacco is able to pull this contract off. Brees’ salary is about $4 million more a year than the next closest positions, which are WR and DE, and the gap between QBs and everyone else is growing. However the high priced QB is no longer pulling off the Super Bowl wins that are expected of them. Of the last 14 Super Bowl champions only 3 have been of the ultra high priced variety- Peyton in 2006, Ben in 2008, and Eli in 2011. Roethlisberger in 2008 was still part of a team at that stage as the transition to being his team was not really complete so in many ways its two players in the last 14 years. The only other mega money QBs to reach the game were Manning in 2009, Brady in 2011, Brady in 2007, and Roethlisberger in 2010. QB’s are earning money for winning the Super Bowl, but it’s questionable whether the league may be pushing too hard at one spot to the detriment of the overall team success. That will be a discussion for another day, but Flacco is going to be the catalyst that gets that discussion started when his contract becomes the new floor for a large group of talented QBs that are playing in the NFL.