How NFL Statistics Lead to Wins, Pt. 3: Salary Cap Efficiency Since 2000

(Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)

Even an incompetent owner can spend money. It takes an intelligent one, on the other hand, to spend that money efficiently.

In a time when multi-billion-dollar entities are going bankrupt, teams are looking to spend less money on free agent signings and draft picks.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers, for instance, were $38 million under the cap prior to free agency. They re-signed just six of their 12 free agents and signed just five others, only one of which—running back Derrick Ward—has a chance to start.

In mid-May, Tampa Bay was sitting at $37 million under the cap, and since then the only transaction they’ve made was signing their fifth-round pick, offensive tackle Xavier Fulton, to a $1.93 million deal with a $181,000 signing bonus.

The Eagles weren’t any better: Sitting $29 million under the cap, Philadelphia re-signed one of their five free agents, wide receiver Hank Baskett, to a one-year deal.

Of their other four free-agent signings, only one was signed to a multi-year deal: tackle Stacy Andrews, to a six-year deal reportedly worth $42 million.

Though they traded for tackle Jason Peters and agreed to a six-year, $60 million contract, Philadelphia currently has $30 million in cap space, according to Pro Football Talk.

More than ever, franchises are cutting back on spending, even making moves to simply reach the salary floor.

But, nevertheless, owners and presidents still want the results on the field; they aren’t tanking games at the expense of saving a few million dollars here and there.

No, they aren’t hoping that their lack of expenditures leads to a lack of wins, but merely a cost-efficient approach of getting into the playoffs.

In the final part of this series, we’ll measure which teams are the best at spending as little money as possible to get the results the fans want. Which teams get the most bang for their buck?

I pulled salary data from USA Today’s salary database for every player since 2000. I then totaled up the cap values for each team, as well as the cap value of offense and defense, respectively, and normalized these values based on the year.

(Note that the sum of a team’s player’s cap values are not the same as its total payroll as noted by USA Today—the sum of total salaries is. But total salary, as shown, includes a player’s full signing bonus, so a guy like Ben Roethlisberger, who had a $25 million signing bonus but a cap value of just $7.97 million, has a total salary north of $27 million. As well, the total payroll went over the 2008 salary cap of $116 million for 13 of 32 teams and does not reflect a team’s actual salary.)

Then, using the regression equation in Part 2, I calculated the wins (we’ll call them xWins)—and, like the team salaries, the xWins from just the offense (xOW) and defense (xDW), respectively—for every team since 2000 and compared salary to wins as well as many other stats of note.

Let’s start with individual team seasons. Do the undefeated 2007 New England Patriots come in as the most profitable team of the century?

In the table below, you’ll find the top 10 and bottom 10 teams since 2000 in each of eight different stats. To find cost-efficiency, salary is divided by xWins—the less a team spends per win, the more economical it is.

I have also included efficiency for both sides of the ball as well. For defense, however, xDWins are first added to games played before being divided by defensive salary. Why? Here’s an example:

Team A spends $50 million on defense, and its defense is worth minus-8 wins; their salary-per-win would be minus-$6.25 million.

Team B spends $60 million on defense, which is also worth minus-8 wins; their salary-per-win is minus-$7.5 million. Team C spends $50 million and gets back minus-10 wins from their defense; their salary-per-win is minus-$5 million.

Team A is obviously the most cost-efficient, but their money-per-win is in the middle of the three teams; there’s no way to sort them for A to come out on top.

By adding 16 to each team’s xDWins, Team A’s defense comes out with the lowest salary-per-win of the three teams. (The 16 is a fudge factor, yes, but it’s the only way to come up with correct results using the salary-per-win method.)

All dollar values are in millions of dollars.

Key:
$/W: Salary per xW
O$/W: Offensive salary per xOW
D$/W: Defensive salary per xDW, which is first added to games played
$: Team salary normalized based on year
$ SD: Standard deviation of team’s player’s salaries, adjusted based on team’s average salary; a lower number means a team spread the wealth of their salary between its players
xW: Wins based on the regression equation in Part 2
xOWAA: Wins based on offensive stats only, above the average for that year
xDWAA: Wins based on defensive stats only, above the average for that year

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