If you ask me, this is one of my best radio appearances to date. This is a passionate conversation about Ray McDonald, domestic violence in the NFL and how the league must address their growing problem of a league comprised of unlikable men.
The Bears made it clear they weren’t going to ditch Jay Cutler without a replacement in mind. Marcus Mariota was that replacement. When Ryan Pace failed to land the Oregon quarterback at the top of this year’s draft, he realize the team’s best chance to win and his best chance to remain Bears GM is Cutler under center. While the team has only committed to Cutler for one season, there’s a good chance the new regime sees him as the guy who can potentially win them a bunch of games. If, for no other reason, because finding someone better isn’t easy to do.
I was recently involved in a discussion where all parties wondered how much dead money factors into team success. The general theory from those involved in the discussion seemed to be that teams who have less dead money, and therefore more of the salary cap to spend on players, should fare better, but nobody had any numbers to back this notion up.
Since I wasn’t able to find more than anecdotal data about the relationship between dead money and team success, I decided to look into it myself. Using data from Spotrac, which dates back to 2011, I looked at dead money (as a percentage of the total cap for that year, to correct for cap inflation) and team winning percentage. This gave me 128 data points-4 seasons each for 32 teams-that I could use to determine how strong the correlation between dead money and winning percentage is.
As you can see in the chart below, I found that there was no appreciable relationship between the amount of dead money a team had and their on-field success that season.
The overall correlation between dead money and winning percentage was completely negligible at 0.004. This indicates that there is absolutely no relationship between the amount of dead money a team carries on their cap and their winning percentage that season.
Of course, looking at only one year at a time can be dangerous, as sometimes dead money in one season sets up success in the next (or vice-versa), and winning percentage can fluctuate by a healthy amount based on luck in a short NFL season. In order to try and reduce the noise in the data, I looked at the average amount of dead money and average winning percentage for each NFL team from 2011-2014. This data, now containing only 32 points, can be seen in the chart below.
Once again, we see no real relationship between dead money and winning percentage. The correlation has improved by a factor of about 20, likely a function of reduced noise, but is still extremely low at only 0.08, far below any reasonable threshold for saying there is a clear relationship between the two data sets.
Finally I looked at addressing a 3rd question: what happens the year after significant dead money comes off the books? Do teams see improvement the year after they swallow a lot of dead money, when they are free to spend more to upgrade the talent on their roster?
I had a bit of a difficult time answering this question. First I looked at the relationship between the change in dead money and the change in winning percentage. This reduced the data set from 4 points per team to 3, since I had no previous year to compare to for 2011, and can be seen in the graph below.
Once again, we see basically no correlation, indicating no significant relationship. But what happens if I select out specifically the teams that had a significant decrease in dead money? Do those teams improve their performance?
Looking at all teams with a drop of at least 5% in dead cap space from one year to the next is the closest I could reasonably come to answering this question without getting too small of a sample size. As it is, I was left with a sample size of only 9, which makes getting a significant correlation difficult.
Unsurprisingly, it the correlation was once again low enough to be meaningless (0.0066), and the average change in win percentage for these 9 teams was actually negative, so there is certainly no evidence to suggest that teams are due for a rebound after significant amounts of dead money come off their cap.
Pretty much any way you look at it, the evidence strongly suggests that there is no relationship between dead money and team success. Teams like Seattle and New England have been among the best in the NFL the last few years despite consistently high amounts of dead money, while teams like Green Bay and San Francisco find consistent success while managing the cap carefully to avoid dead money.
What this ultimately suggests is that other factors, such as the ability to draft and develop talent and find players to fit your system, have a much greater influence on team success. Getting a number of quality contributors on rookie contracts more than makes up for large amounts of dead money, as we have seen with the Colts and Seahawks in recent years. Top-notch quarterback play carries you through a number of obstacles, as we have seen in New England, Denver, and Green Bay. Good coaching turns teams around in a hurry, as we have seen recently in San Francisco and Arizona, while bad coaching can ruin teams, as we just saw in Chicago.
There are any number of factors that influence team success in the NFL, which is one of the reasons it is so much fun to follow, but the data says that dead money is not one of them.
Picture if you will…
January 3rd 2016.
Lions at Bears.
John Fox has rejuvenated the Bears franchise and led them to a 9-6 record. A win, at home, against the lowly Detroit Lions will send them into the postseason.
Lions lead 24-17 heading into the fourth quarter. The heavens open. Snow. Not just snow. A blizzard. Both teams struggle to move the ball. The game seems lost. With 1:07 remaining, Cutler hands the ball to Forte at midfield. A hole opens! Forte slips! Forte slides! End zone! Touchdown! Overtime!
Or not. Because now, according to the new rules of the NFL, in the howling winds off the lake, with snow piled an inch and a half high off the field, the Bears must now make a 32-yard field goal to enter the postseason.
I’ve never cared for the writing of Bill Simmons. It’s just not my thing. It’s doesn’t stop me from acknowledging Simmons as the most important sports media voice since the turn of the century.
Why don’t I care for Simmons? Content and approach.
Pop culture references in sports writing, movies, music…etc always bother me because they limit the lasting power of the piece. Nobody on earth will get the references in The 40 Year-Old Virgin – an otherwise funny movie – twenty years from now. (They actually make jokes in that film about Maid in Manhattan, a movie people had forgotten before it was released.) Simmons not only utilizes pop-culture references but often uses reality TV and his favorite movies as the complete framework for his columns.
Simmons likes a lot of stuff I don’t care for. He likes reality TV and fantasy football and wrestling. He’s spawned a generation of barroom boneheads saying things like “Andre Iguodala is like the girlfriend who blah blah blah nonsense.” He’s glib and unserious and that works for this generation of young males (especially his most dedicated readers) who have a detachment from the sports they watch.
Perhaps the most unexpected thing to come from the Bears new regime is the consistent praise of annual disappointment Shea McClellin.
When Vic Fangio was asked about returning players who could contribute, McClellin’s name was the second one to come out of his mouth (after Kyle Fuller, of course). John Fox admitted to liking him come out of college and said he “has a bright future.” These are two old school football men. They have done this before. They have nothing invested in Shea McClellin.
Even though they didn’t pick up his fifth-year option (which would’ve made him one of the highest-paid inside linebackers in the league) the Bears have made it clear that they see McClellin as a piece of their defense, somewhere.
They genuinely seem to like him.
This season DBB would like to introduce some new elements to the site aside from the columns and podcasts. Today I am asking you, the loyal readership, what you’d like from this site. What does this site not currently provide that you wish it did?
All ideas are welcome and please share them in the comments below. If you’d prefer to email me, feel free to do so: jeff@dabearsblog.com.
He has one of the league’s top backs, one of the league’s top tight ends, a terrific receiving corps (especially if Kevin White makes an immediate impact) and a quarterback that can make every throw. The unit has two holes: health/production from right tackle and the decision-making of the quarterback. Gase’s system should mitigate both to an extent with a run-heavy approach and quick, timing throws. Gase is going to be a head coach in 2016.
“His makeup is outstanding. When you talk about work ethic, team captain, leadership all those traits that we stress around here, he brings those to the table.”
-Ryan Pace
The Bears expect Kevin White to be a star but third-round pick Hroniss Grasu could be the most important piece of establishing their new identity. Taking Grasu in the third round wasn’t sexy and wasn’t expected, but it’s not unlike 1998 when the Bears spent the 64th pick on Olin Kreutz. One major difference: Grasu’s impact should be felt more immediately.
