The NFL world was finally put to rest as the two-year-long saga of quarterback Dak Prescott’s contract negotiations with the Dallas Cowboys were concluded with him signing a four-year, $160 million deal. The NFL is a hard-salary-capped league: there's a set amount of money each year that is allowed to pay all its' players. Analysts and fans were concerned that Dak's contract could take up too much of the Cowboys’ salary cap in the coming seasons hindering their ability to sign free agents and resign drafted talent in order to surround Dak with the talent required to win games in the regular season and compete in the playoffs.
I AM SO RELIEVED DAK VS JERRY HAS FINALLY ENDED. Yet as I've said from the start, my fear is Dak will take up so much of the cap, nearly a fourth, that they won't be able to fix the D or aging O line. I also worry that Dak will struggle to live up to this much $$$.
— Skip Bayless (@RealSkipBayless) March 9, 2021
It's somewhat of a well-known fact that having a quarterback take up too much of the cap can hinder a team's ability to win the Super Bowl. No Super Bowl-winning quarterback has taken up more than 14% of the cap in the salary cap era. The highest was Tom Brady this past season taking up 13.9%. Warren Sharp has done excellent analysis to show that spending in free agency rarely works; he argues good teams build through the draft and take advantage of good players on cheap contracts. He further argues that teams "win" free agency not by spending big on big-name players but picking up a few minor pieces here and there while letting your own players walk if they receive exorbitant offers.
(Ron Jenkins, Associated Press)
I was curious as to whether this logic extends to the cap as a whole. Do teams that pay a few players a large amount of the cap have lackluster regular-season win totals and struggle in the playoffs? I suspect there is a sweet spot of “top-heaviness” that yields the best results. If a team doesn’t have any players taking up a large portion of the cap, assuming the front office is at least somewhat competent, that likely means they don’t have very talented players on the roster to command such a salary. On the other hand, if a team is very top-heavy salary-wise, that means that they don’t have the room to surround those few elite players with a supporting cast as explained before. Let's take a look at the skew of teams and their regular-season win totals:
Over the past six years, only 2 teams having their top 5 players take up less than 25% of the cap has even made the playoffs: the 2017 Titans and 2015 Seahawks. The smoothed mean line does confirm the first part of my hypothesis. Bad teams generally don't have top-heavy cap hit distributions because they don't have elite talent (otherwise they'd win more) and rely heavily on drafting players, who are on cheap rookie deals. The graph does show some deviation on the higher ends of the graph but it's inclusive. Segmenting the data by season reveals some new insights:
Only in three of the past six seasons do we have, a concave-down trend, which would track with my prior logic. I don't think that there's really anything meaningful in this data between season to season. The differences can probably be attributed to varying strengths of free agency classes. In a class with a lot of talent, teams don't have to bid as high with contract offers so they're less likely to overpay. In a class with relatively lesser talent (or just a few elite players), teams get into a bidding war, and almost always the "winner of the auction" will end up the loser by overpaying drastically.
In the seasons where the Super Bowl Winner was towards the more skewed cap hit distributions, champions relied on their defense. In the 2015 season, Von Miller led that Broncos defense to obliterate MVP Cam Newton's offense in SB50. In 2018, Bill Belichek's defense held the Sean McVay offense, which averaged 33 points a game in the regular season, to a single field goal. This past season, the Buccs defense was inconsistent throughout the year but came alive in the postseason forcing turnovers and pressuring Patrick Mahomes a record amount in the Super Bowl. In contrast, SBLI was very offensive where Tom Brady score 31 straight points to overcome a 28-3 deficit. SBLII was a complete shootout between Brady and Foles. The Chiefs won in SBLV due to their offense finally breaking through in the fourth quarter and scoring 21 unanswered to close the game.
Moral of the story: If you're gonna spend, spend money on defense. Defense
wins championships.
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