I've seen this movie play a few times. It's how my Giants won two Super Bowls with some pretty average teams in recent years.
I always said, that if I was a GM, the first thing I do is find the best Offensive Line coach and make him the highest paid coach on the team. Because if you have a good offensive line, you are a contender, regardless of what you have at the skill positions.
The NFL used to be held up as an example of socialism that works. Now, it’s socialism that is socialism.
The “middle class” player in the NFL is gone. The slightly above average middle linebacker who plays 8 years in the league? Doesn’t exist anymore.
You are either paying that middle linebacker $25 million or he is some dude on his rookie deal, whose salary allows you pay the star cornerback $25 million.
Anyway, how many games would this new rule have impacted over the last ten years?
Well what parity does is spread out the talent. What folks forget about those dominant teams was how much the rest of the league just kind of stank. There’s a problem these days with bad divisions, but they only stay bad for a couple of seasons. Back in the hallowed dynasty days whole divisions stank for a decade or longer. At least now things cycle around, teams float up. It’s now actually a challenge to keep a team bad for more than 5 seasons (a challenge sadly half a dozen owners prove to be up to).
I’m really hoping the Cleveland moneyball experiment works. We know it can work since that’s basically how the Pats are built, the problem is so far nobody is trying to copy that part of the Pats. If a second team can at least get good by actually properly valuing players we might see the bottom of the league lift. Heck even Jerry Jones seems to have figured out high cost free agents aren’t a good plan under a hard cap, took him 20 years but if Jones can learn...