Under The Cap: 2008 Cap Efficiency

Shouldn't Detroit have "Infinity" as their team salary / wins? Or an error?

Bruce Allen was fired because he refused to fire Jon Gruden, not because ownership was unhappy with him. The two used to work together in Oakland, and Gruden pushed for a reunion when the Glazers took his side in the dispute between him and Rich McKay. I have no idea about Bruce Allen's skills as a talent evaluator, but he was great with the cap. I hope Mark Dominik was taking notes.

Wait - am I reading this wrong, or did the Buffalo Bills have the highest team salary in 2008?

I've been wondering for a few years if the Vikings are showing a good way of playing the cap game. Having gone through the usual cap hell back in '98 or '99, where there was a lot of dead money taking up cap space, they seemed to hit a point about 5 years back where they suddenly had a lot of cap space. And they started giving 'signing bonuses' in the form of roster bonuses dated a few weeks in the future. The full cap hit of the roster bonus occurs when the bonus is paid, unlike pro-rated signing bonuses. And thus the dead space problem never crops up. Combine that with the Vikings being one of the biggest (ab)users of the 'likely to be earned' bonus trick (a LTBE bonus that isn't earned is credited to the next years cap, and thus serves as a nice way of carrying unused cap space forwards to the next year), and the Vikings are likely to have a lot of unused cap space come the start of free agency every year - at least until someone gets careless and uses too much of it up on signing bonuses rather than roster bonuses. Fortunately, we don't have Daniel Snyder as an owner, so it shouldn't be a problem.

To me, the most interesting team on these charts is Pittsburgh. Middling in efficiency and dead-last in rollover, they still seem to manage to maintain a stable roster that competes at the highest levels every year.

Maybe the key isn't conserving cap space, but spending your cap resources on good players.

What question are these numbers answering? If it's "how good are teams at fielding a good team without sacrificing the future", a good start would be losses per rolled-over dollar (possibly normalized to consider rolled over dollars as a percentage, since they're a small part of the cap). Even that's pretty rough, however -- if a team is up against the cap with only 45 players signed, but 35 of those players are HoFers in their primes, they're doing alright.

As to the stats provided: I'm trying to construct a question that these stats answer, and completely failing. Especially the "efficiency rating" -- pull some %s out of the air, take some weighted averages and -- voila! Another number! It has digits, and everything! But..."a number" is the closest I can come to quantifying it.

The one problem I have with this piece is that, based on the first table, I'm assuming that for "wins" you used regular season victories. However, in the opening paragraph, it's stated that wins has the most weight because "if you win games and ultimately a Super Bowl, your team is a success." Yet from the table is appears that postseason victories are discounted. I don't see the logic in that. It's safe to say that the Steelers had a much more successful season than the Giants in 2008, and I think it makes more sense for this to be reflected in using the total wins for Pittsburgh as 15 instead of 12. Heck one could argue that a Super Bowl victory should count as more than one "win," but at the very least it should be counted.

I'm not really sure cap room is such a great measure of anything good. Everybody always holds out the Eagles as great with the cap because they always have tons of room and generally contend. That always ignores the fact that the Eagles depth chart at receiver (and frequently RB) is generally a puddle, and that said lack of depth often leads to their eventual playoff loss and complete lack of rings in this era when they've been so "good" with the cap. I might compare cap room to DVOA or even DPAR at skill positions instead of regular season wins, I think that might show better which teams are over paying for talent or pointlessly siting on money.

Sorry guys. I disagree. If you discount the teams that had injuries ruin their season and put efficency and rollover together, you get a pretty good idea why some teams suck year after year.
I do agree that including post season wins would give you a lot better picture.

Bruce Allen may deserve credit for rolling over cap room while other teams let it waste away, but in general the reason the Bucs had so much cap room was not really Allen's dealing at all, merely the perfect storm of having virtually all of the higher priced Super Bowl players off the roster by 2006 and missing two 1st round picks and two 2nd round picks between 2002-2004. The majority of the highly paid players in the NFL right now were drafted in that window and the Bucs didn't have a shot at hardly any of them. Additionally once the Bucs got their picks back, they didn't do the best job picking players who would require high value contracts in order to keep them. By all indications Allen is a great numbers guy, but not suited to the title of General Manager with talent evaluation responsibilities.

First note: the abbreviation for the Rams has been "STL" on FO, not "SL". Took me a second to figure out what team that was.

"The cap space rolled over component is important in my opinion because the NFL practices a "use it or lose it" philosophy towards unused cap space. Therefore, teams are wise to roll over their unused cap space into the next capped year; interestingly, not all teams rollover their unused cap space."

I'm kinda curious as to how some teams manage to be exactly $0 under the cap, to be honest. The reason why I'm curious is that the only rollover mechanism I know of are unearned LTBEs, and you can't insert an LTBE *after* all your games are over, obviously, and you won't know exactly how much cap space you have left until the end of the year, because an injury that forces a guy on IR requires you to sign another guy. Now, for a team that doesn't make the playoffs, they can always use up all their cap space before the final game, because any injuries that happen in that game won't eat up more cap space (because there are no more games).

That logic doesn't exactly work with the Vikings, obviously, so I don't really get it. Would the Vikings have been screwed if they had won the game and had an injury, or is there some secret way of pushing forward cash *after* the season's over?

Is there any reason to not roll over as much as possible from a cap/spending perspective? Is the salary floor the same for all teams?

I can see where fans might not want to hear that KC is $49.9M under the cap instead of $31.1M, but from a competitive standpoint, that money/space could come in handy in future years.

Philly was able to sign Asante Samuel to a big deal and still have a lot of cap room left over. In the long run, they'll be able to pay more players (either their own or other free agents) market value contracts.

Compared to a team like the Patriots (this isn't a fair comparison since they have spent to the cap the last few years) who potentially have Logan Mankins, Vince Wilfork, Richard Seymour and Stephen Gostkowski heading for free agency in 2010. They lack the cap room to sign them all without some Washington Redskins-style accounting. Or the refuses-to-die-rumor that they want Peppers. Sitting on extra-accumulated cap room like that would give a team flexibility to make a move like that without blowing up their cap.

Are postseason wins and championships factored into the formula?

I would really like to see DVOA used instead of wins to measure efficiency.

With the cap basically increasing over the last four seasons roughly 49.7% from the $85.5 million it was in 2005 to the now close too $128 million in 2009. That, that is not the main reason teams have such a surplus in cap space. Add to it the LTBE Loophole and viola every team has cap space to keep players.

Even mismanaged cap strapped teams of yesteryear have money to play with, effectively the NFL has let teams who make bad investments off the hook, which shut the door on June 1st cuts and season ending player purgers as teams have had the luxury of an extra $42.5 million to play with to cover up there personnel plunders.

Man, i love this new feature. Tremendous insight into what my team is doing relative to the league. I love to read something so new, so fresh, so smart that I feel like I don't deserve to be reading it. And great comments.

I would like to see this normalized on a per player per play basis. Game checks of everyone playing Team A v game checks of Team B week by week over a season $YAR, $VOA or something. That might have a particularly strong correlation with teams that could rebound. Not to mention on teams that trend to be poor in evaluating veteran talent and or injury risk.

If I'm understanding Detroit's Rollover number correctly - does that say Millen was terrible as a talent evaluator and EQUALLY as bad at managing the cap??

Here is my problem with rewarding rollover dollars: they are like a savings acocunt indeed, but the team is expected to SPEND that money at some point and GET SOMETHING for it (wins, pro bowlers, a SB ring). So if some nutty miser keeps socking it away until he has $200M in the account, great for him. But that doesn't deserve an "A" unless he has something tangible to show for it in the end.

Therefore, I propose much more work for J.I. Halsell: A longitudinal study for, say, five years.

The reason I think rollover is great is if you see four superstars' contracts expiring next year and you want to sign them all, it makes sense to stockpile money, no? But if your team has low roster and salary volatility, doesn't it make more sense to spend to the max every year and try to squeeze out the best roster and most wins you can every year?

I guess I am saying that saving for saving's sake is a means and not an end, and should not be rewarded without evaluating the pragmatic results that follow. If those teams with big rollovers this year win 13 games next year, THEN they get kudos. If they win 8-9, then they don't get rewarded for the savings that they did not use wisely.

If we're talking about my 8 year-old, then yes, I want him to save save save. if we are talking about my football team, I want them to spend spend spend. I'm gonna call Alan Greenspan on this and see what he thinks.

Bruce Allen may be a good hire to manage a salary cap, but nothing I saw during his Bucs tenure would indicate he's able to manage a roster.

I dunno, I don't think real fans give a f*ck about cap efficiency when their team chokes in big game after big game.

This seems like a silly exercise. In order to really examine salary efficiency, you'd have to examine the composition of playing time between high/low salary players on each team. Also, why are 'wins' the statistic given most weight...seeing as that's largely a function of coaching and luck, it seems like there's too much volatility in that statistic. Why not use some of the DVOA statistics floating around this website, instead?

I don't know what Halsell's cap number is for 2009, but he sure was a good FA pickup for FO. Nice summary, interesting insight, thoughtful replies. A great addition to this site.

J.I.

Another great column. Thanks a lot.

My take on salary cap management and overall team strategy is pretty simple

Continuity.

If you look at the great teams who are typically very successful year after year, there are two similar organization traits about them.

1. They have a well-defined team strategy for acquiring talent, salary cap management, etc., and

2. They (organizational leadership) are allowed to stay in place for an extended period of time to fully develop that strategy.

The actual "team strategy" can be very different, i.e., compare the Colts to the Pats to the Steelers...but for each team it works because they pick a team overall strategy and tailor their coaching staff, their salary cap and their FA/talent acquisition methods around it.

The teams that seem to "yo-yo" or consistently suck year after year seem to have so many changes, that the "wasted years" where they are reinventing themselves consistently never allow the multiple years of tactical decisions to catch up the the overall team strategy.

JI, what was the leaguewide minimum salary last year? I notice that the lowest 2008 aggregate cap numbers for any team is the $107MM in KC and Cin. Wondering how constrained those teams were by the minimum.

Great article, loved it, but the point of a General Manager is to construct a winning team within salary cap rules, NOT win an efficiency contest. Bruce Allen's teams won less than 50% of their regular seasons games during his tenure in Tampa. The market term to describe him is "cheap for a reason." We need to construct a "GM-VOA" to compare his performance vs. a replacement level GM throwing darts against a board. If you're looking for a GM, nothing in Bruce's track record would make you consider him.

I'd agree with a number of the posts on Bruce Allen. The cap space has mainly been as a consequence of circumstances: the disintergration of a Superbowl team, lack of 1st round draft picks and the absence of a franchise quarterback. Allen may have had a reasonable head for numbers but his evaluation of talent was shocking and ultimately this was his downfall. Bring back Rich McKay!

Explain why the Steelers had the third-best salary-to-wins ratio but are ranked in the bottom half on efficiency. Their '08 salary of nearly $114M appears to be average within the league. And while they "borrowed" $0.8M from '09, even an adusted '08 salary is not excessive. As long as the salary level is sustainable, isn't the salary-to-win ratio, looked at over time, the best measure of efficiency? I mean the borrowing or rolling over can only be done for so long. What matters in the long run is how much you are consistently spending to win games. By that measure, NYG, TB (both ranked high) and PIT (ranked middling) helped their long-term track records on winning efficiency the most. Or am I missing something?