Ndamukong Suh Is the Steal of Free Agency, Thanks to Shifting Free-Agent Market

If you pay attention to the NFL, you've seen the studies that will tell you that free agency is the "wrong way" to build your team. You've read the listicles of failed big-money free-agency signings, undoubtably headlined by former Washington defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth.

You have probably developed the opinion that there is such a thing as an overpay in free agency and that the Dolphins crossed that line when giving former Lions defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh the richest contract ever awarded to a defensive tackle.

That stance, however, depends on a static definition of the free-agency market. The problem with it is that the value of free agents shifts according to the available money. And for the first time in a long while, NFL teams are watching the salary cap stream up slowly. 

What does this mean in a vacuum? It means that teams that have rewarded their players with long-term extensions are only going to see those contracts become more valuable as the salary cap continues to escalate.

Suh's contract looks awful in comparison to defensive end J.J. Watt's deal, because Watt is better and was never truly a free agent. But, in two years, teams will be clamoring to sign a player of Suh's stature to a contract like he got this season. In fact, former Tampa Bay Buccaneers general manager Mark Dominik actually had Suh pegged to sign for more than he got.

Year	Salary Cap
2008	$116 million
2009	$123 million
2010	uncapped
2011	$120 million
2012	$120.8 million
2013	$123 million
2014	$133 million
2015	$143 million

One thing that's worth acknowledging is that 90 percent of NFL contracts will never be finalized without a release.

I remember noting how rare it was when Jared Allen's deal with the Minnesota Vikings came to an end when I wrote the Vikings chapter of Football Outsiders Almanac 2013. Players who see the end of their contracts are the rare few who play at a consistently great level and also manage to avoid debilitating injury. 

But here's the thing about that: Suh does play at a consistently great level. Suh has little in the way of injury history. Suh is still in his prime at 28 and should be a fixture for at least the next three seasons, which is as far out as any NFL team can reasonably project.

Sure, he's had moments where being overly aggressive has harmed his team, but we're not talking about a guy with character flaws that put him in the cross hairs of the new personal-conduct policy.

This is as sure of an investment as you can get in the modern NFL. Guys like this only go onto the market because of extenuating circumstances. Extenuating circumstances such as the fact that slapping the franchise tag on him would've saddled the Detroit Lions with a preposterous single-season cap hit. 

And I think because of how quickly the cap moved, teams didn't recognize that there was an opportunity to land Suh at a price he shouldn't have been available at.   

Year	Sacks	QB Hurries	PFF Rating
2012	9 (2nd)	29 (3rd)	+15.2 (4th)
2013	5 (12th)	54 (2nd)	+32.8 (2nd)
2014	8 (5th)	37 (1st)	+27.5 (3rd)

Let me tell you a tale of some perpetually bad organizations and the idea of cap flexibility.

For years now, the Jacksonville Jaguars, Cleveland Browns and Oakland Raiders have been siphoning cap space up, rolling it off into the next year if possible, and hoping that one day it would matter.

Because the NFL salary cap rose, suddenly these teams were not the only ones who could offer big-money deals to free agents.

(Not that the salary cap is actually a detriment to a team if they want to get around it—see Jairus Byrd's Saints contract for an example—but it gave more teams the freedom to imagine a big splash.)

Those three teams had a chance to completely rebuild their franchises. They had the opportunity to home in on the top free agents on the market—the actual difference-makers—and overpay them to change the culture. Outside of the Jaguars bringing in Julius Thomas, they didn't. 

NFL teams are built on depth—that is a truism that is actually true. But NFL teams also don't win games with nothing but solid-average players.

As I often do, I'll invoke the Pareto Principle: 20 percent of your players provide 80 percent of the difference in you winning and losing. You could stack the Raiders with league-average players at every position they had nothing at last year, but they're not winning anything without star-caliber talent. 

Star players also invoke a snowball effect. Not only do they provide the most impact toward wins, but they also make you a more palatable destination for other free agents.

A quick hypothetical example: If you took the Indianapolis Colts roster heading into free agency (with the fifth-most cap space in the league according to SI.com) and exchanged Andrew Luck for Blake Bortles, their free-agent plan would have been completely different.

Frank Gore and Trent Cole would look for other places to play for a title. Andre Johnson would not seriously consider them. There's a whole market of aging former superstars in the NFL who are not normally available to terrible teams, and teams like the Denver Broncos and New England Patriots have done an excellent job of exploiting it over the past few years to supplement their core.

So look, the Raiders can gripe about state income taxes. The Browns can note that they're such a nuclear-disaster situation right now that nobody with a choice should want to touch them. The Jaguars can...well, I actually have no idea why the Jaguars didn't go after Suh.

But anyway, the point is: In a year where these teams have to spend money to get to a salary floor, and where they had ungodly amounts of cap space available, it's completely inexplicable that somehow none of them came out of free agency with the highest bid for Suh. Bleacher Report's Michael Schottey proposed a "help" intervention for the Raiders:

Teams like these often need trailblazers who will set the tone for the transition from stomping ground to respectability. Said trailblazers often need to be grossly overpaid to accept the assignment.

My favorite example is a baseball one: when the 119-loss 2003 Tigers walked into free agency and overpaid catcher Ivan Rodriguez drastically. Was there every chance that Rodriguez would break down before his contract was up? Absolutely. He was a catcher in his 30s.

But the Tigers also won nearly 40 more games in 2004. All of the sudden they became an up-and-coming team that stars would at least consider playing for. By 2006, they were in the World Series. 

Player	Positon	Rumored Agreed Deal	Comments
Julius Thomas	TE	5 years, $46 million, $24 million gtd	Great tight end in Manning offense, and a necessary stab to attempt to save Blake Bortles, but can he stay healthy?
Jared Odrick	DL	"$7 million per season," $22 million gtd	Versatile lineman, but one sack last season and hardly a star
Davon House	CB	4 years, $25 million, $9 million gtd	Really like this signing—a good young player who has desperately needed more playing time.
Jermey Parnell	OT	5 years, $32 million, $13 million gtd	Completely non-descript player outside of a few good starts on a great offensive line last season.
Sergio Brown	S	3 years, $9 million	When your starting safety is Josh Evans, it's worth seeing if a small-sample size fluke like Brown can do better for cheap.
Dan Skuta	LB	5 years, $20.5 million	700 solid snaps in SF over the past two years...but that's a lot of theoretical cash.

As I said, I think Thomas is an honest stab at this. But other than that, who have these teams signed that honestly has that kind of ceiling?

Is Rodney Hudson a good center? He played like one last season. Does he have a long history of playing like that? He has two good seasons to his credit and had a season-ending injury in 2012.

Imagine you have to overpay Rodney Hudson or Ndamukong Suh, because you are the Raiders, and you are going to overpay one of them. This isn't a hard question, right? So why were the Raiders so afraid of setting the market for the best player available? Were they afraid of creating an identity beyond "Reggie McKenzie's Failed Quarterback Theatre?"

The NFL has a salary cap, but its salary system is hardly designed in such a way that a bad team couldn't exploit it to get overpayments off the books as early as possible. Maybe you do carry Suh at an enormous cap figure for two or three seasons. Guess what? That is much more likely to deliver you to respectability than signing Jermey Parnell to a "maybe he's good" deal because you have a hole at right tackle.

And when you do hit respectability, like the Colts did, you don't actually need all the extra cap space. Still-good players who actually want to play for a contender will prioritize your team.

By the time a lot of third-contract NFL players actually hit free agency, they're looking for a chance to win a title. It's part of the psychological DNA that makes up the most competitive athletes on the planet. Andre Johnson's list of teams was not very complicated when he hit free agency: each of the four conference championship game participants, as noted by ESPN's Terry Blount: 

All of this isn't to say that the Miami Dolphins are going to win anything simply because they have Suh.

They'll need to work out the timing between Ryan Tannehill and their remaining receivers. They'll have to figure out what to do with Mike Wallace, a free-agent signing who got signed to a superstar contract, despite the notable handicap of not being a superstar. To say that sticking with head coach Joe Philbin is a questionable decision is not a controversial statement. There are things to work out here.

But if you weren't one of the teams blessed by the magic franchise-quarterback fairy, all you can do is steadily improve your team's talent level. The quickest way to do that is to sign a surefire stud player at a position of massive importance, and other than quarterback and perhaps the mythical "shutdown corner," no position matters as much as a pass-rusher. 

In their rush to stay within social norms and responsible spending plans, it sure seems like the teams that really could have used Suh missed the forest for the trees.

But don't worry, I'm sure overpaying the lower-middle tier of free agents to hit the salary floor will work out as intended. I'm sure Josh McCown and Dan Skuta will change everything, and they can slap some "we're building through the draft" tag lines on their franchise and hit five wins instead of four. I'm sure we won't have this same discussion about these same teams in 2016. 

All DYAR and DVOA numbers cited are courtesy of Football Outsiders. Learn more about DVOA here.

Rivers McCown is the AFC South lead writer for Bleacher Report and the co-host of the Three-Cone Drill podcast. His work has also appeared on Football Outsiders and ESPN.com. Follow him on Twitter at @riversmccown.