Easy meat: Deion Sanders, 5th overall draft pick, drafted by the Falcons a team that was always low revenue, sniped by the Niners. Hmm you forgot to mention Sanders in the SB Niners list of dominant players.
Drafting was important then, drafting has always been important in the NFL, largely because so few trades take place. It’s at least as important now.
And they stayed in Dallas because Dallas was the highest revenue team in the league and could afford to write blank checks to players to keep them. Now a team not only has to draft well, they have to spend smart, you can’t overpay for talent, you can’t tie up $60 million on 6 players and not suffer. Now is the time when character matters most for players, you need top tier players that are smart enough to know they’ll make more money with a good team because of endorsements and outside the game money.
That Cowboys team wasn’t broke up by the cap, that Cowboys team was broken up by STUPIDITY and inability to use the cap. Jones fell into the greatest trap of sports, and it’s a trap even when there is no cap, many NHL teams fell into the same trap in the 90s: deferred salary. Jones used deferred salary to pay over the cap in one season, mortgaging the future for success now. The Niners and Broncos did the same stupid thing, deferred salary sounds good this year but turns next year and the year after into nightmares. That’s what broke up the Cowboys, they deferred a bunch of salary and then found nearly 1/4 of their cap space taken up paying for the past. Had they not overpaid with deferred salary they’d have been able to keep that team together. Like I said: it’s all about the SMARTS now, you can’t be stupid with the money in the cap era, especially the early cap era.
No the Falcons got punished for drafting Vick. They wasted their first round pick on a mediocre QB, then have spent years trying to find the magic coach that can make the mediocre QB worth the pick and the money. The fact that they then threw a ton of money at the mediocre QB is just compounding the stupidity and prolonging the punishment. But the Vick experiment was a failure from day one, long before they tied too much cap space to him.
That is a legitimate complaint about Eli, but it has nothing to do with the cap. That’s bad drafting, exactly the thing you said doesn’t matter in the cap era. They wasted a #1 pick on a guy that for 4 years has demonstrated 3rd or 4th round talent, the fact that they tied up #1 pick cap space to him just puts a dollar value to his lack of performance.
That’s not true at all. Reference: Aaron Rodgers. Green Bay’s first round pick whose waiting around begging Favre to retire. And again I’ll bring up Tony Romo, signed as an undrafted free agent in 2003, learned, was seasoned, started in 2006. Then there’s Tom Brady, 2nd day pick, spent an entire season on the bench, only became a starter when he did because Bledsoe got injured. Philip Rivers spent 2 fairly expensive years holding the clip board given when he was drafted. Smart teams still let guys season on the bench a while.
Smart teams have plenty of depth in many positions. It’s still a 53 man roster, with 109 million dollars to spread around, plenty of room for depth on the chart. If the team is smart. They have to scout smart, draft smart AND spend smart. That’s all the cap really does, force smart spending on ALL the teams, not just the teams that aren’t the Cowboys.
He's also an unusual case, and hardly representative of the entire league. Because he played both football and baseball professionally, he had the luxury of playing off his baseball and football employers against each other (with the implied threat of "retiring" at any time from either sport). It's worth noting that Sanders left the 49ers after that one season and signed a deal with -- you guessed it -- the Dallas Cowboys!
I'll answer the rest of these points later . . . I've got some work to do here!