I recently looked at the recent history (2006-14) of 1st round wide receivers in their rookie seasons to see what it is reasonable to expect from Kevin White in 2015.  Now I am going to look more closely at comparable players from that list to Kevin White based on his physical attributes and college production.

Physical attributes

I put together a list of the height and 40 time of all 30 receivers drafted in the first round since 2006 (based on Combine measurements when available, Pro Day when needed).  Kevin White measured in at 6’3″ and ran a 4.35 second 40 yard dash, so I looked for guys who measured between 6’2″ and 6’4″ and ran the 40 in 4.40 seconds or less as being similar to White.  The full list, which is very short, is seen below.

There are only four wide receivers who can roughly match White’s size/speed combo who have been drafted in the 1st round since 2006.  That shows the rare traits White possesses, and the names Julio Jones and Demaryius Thomas show you just how high his upside is.  Of course, players like Robert Meachem and Darrius Heyward-Bey show that this is no guarantee of stardom.

College production

I also looked at the college production of all the wide receivers drafted in the 1st round since 2006.  Since one of the fears with Kevin White is that he only has one strong season of college production on his resume, I looked at their production in their best college season as well as their production in their 2nd best college season.  Besides White, there were six players with at least 1,000 yards in their best season, less than 750 yards in their 2nd best season, and at least 400 yards difference between their best and 2nd best season.  That list is provided below.

Once again we see players who are stars and players who are busts, with very little in between.  Of the six players with similar college resumes to Kevin White, two (Demaryius Thomas and Dez Bryant) have become NFL superstars, two (Kelvin Benjamin and Odell Beckham) are coming off big rookie seasons and seem headed to NFL stardom, while two (AJ Jenkins and Robert Meachem) never accomplished much in the NFL, though Meachem at least had a couple seasons as a solid role player.

Combining both

Looking at players with White’s combination of size, speed, and college production, we narrow it down even further.  There are only two players who are comparable to White in both of the categories above: Demaryius Thomas and Robert Meachem.

I think it seems reasonable  to say those two serve as a baseline worst (Meachem) and best (Thomas) case scenario for White’s career.  It’s also worth noting that neither player did much as a rookie. Thomas had 22 catches for 283 yards as a rookie, while Meachem spent his rookie season on injured reserve and only posted 12 catches for 289 yards in his sophomore campaign, but that is a very small sample size and does not mean for sure White will have such a small impact in his rookie season.

Boom or bust?

Throughout his comparables we see the immense boom or bust potential that White possesses.  Bears fans can only hope that he avoids busting, because he should be a superstar if he does.

When the Bears drafted wide receiver Kevin White from West Virginia with the 7th overall pick of the draft, the expectation was that he would step into the starting lineup opposite Alshon Jeffery and make a significant impact in his rookie season.  Many fans certainly expect great things from White, starting in 2015, with a few even suggesting to me on Twitter recently that they think White will lead the Bears in receiving yards.

With that in mind, I wanted to take a look at the history of rookie wide receivers similar to White and see what they have done as rookies.  Thus I looked at every wide receiver drafted in the first round from 2006-14, a sample size of 30 players.  A full list of players, along with their rookie stats, can be viewed here.

Average production

Over the last 9 years, the average rookie receiver drafted in the first round has received 88 targets, caught 50 passes, gained 689 yards, and scored five touchdowns (this excludes AJ Jenkins, who recorded no statistics his rookie year, and Robert Meachem, who spent his rookie year on injured reserve).  But these numbers fluctuate tremendously; three receivers topped 1,000 yards (including one who had over 1,300), while four failed to record even 300 receiving yards.  Let’s look at how that production spreads out; the graph below shows the number of receivers in various ranges of receiving yards.

There is a pretty good spread across the board.  Between three and five players filled every category of 100 yards between 400 and 1000 yards, as well as more than 1000 and less than 400.  So it’s clear to see that the range of possibilities for Kevin White as a rookie are very broad.

Of course, you can argue that rookie seasons from eight or nine years ago don’t have much impact on 2015, as passing stats have exploded over that time frame.  There is some merit to that logic, but don’t get carried away.  Many fans remember the monster rookie seasons put forth by the 2014 class of rookie wide receivers and think that will be the norm going forward, but a closer look at the trends makes it seem likely that will prove to be an outlier.  To illustrate this, the graph below shows the average number of receiving yards for 1st round picks each year since 2006 (note 2008 is excluded because there were no 1st round picks at wide receiver that year).

As you can see, 2014 showed a huge jump in production by rookie wide receivers drafted in the 1st round, and expecting that to repeat itself does not seem realistic.  Overall the production of 1st round picks wide receivers doesn’t seem to have changed much since 2006, though it does fluctuate a bit from year to year.

Top 10 picks

Now I want to look at players more closely resembling Kevin White in a variety of factors.  I’ll start with draft position.  White was drafted 7th overall, and the expectations for a player like that compared to somebody drafted late in the first round should be different in their rookie seasons.  So let’s look at how the 10 receivers drafted in the top 10 since 2006.

The average production of these players is slightly higher than the average production of 1st round receivers as a whole in the last nine years; these 10 players averaged 96 targets, 50 catches, 723 yards, and five touchdowns as rookies.  Again there is a lot of fluctuation, with two players topping 1,000 yards and three failing to reach 500.

Team situation

Of course, one thing that could impact White’s production as a rookie is that the Bears already have an established player across from him in Alshon Jeffery.  On the one hand, this helps White, as he will not draw as much attention from opposing defenses.  But it could also limit White’s targets.  I counted 9 other 1st round receivers between 2006 and 2014 who went into a similar situation.  Let’s look at how they did in their rookie years.

These players definitely fared a little better than rookie 1st round receivers as a whole; they averaged 90 targets, 53 catches, 760 yards, and five touchdowns in their rookie seasons.  So it seems that having an established number one receiver opposite you as a rookie does help make the transition easier for rookies.

Stay tuned

There is definitely potential for Kevin White to have a monster rookie season like Mike Evans, Odell Beckham Jr., and Kelvin Benjamin did in 2014, but expecting that seems unrealistically optimistic.  Rookie 1st round receivers have been spread out pretty evenly from 400-1000 yards over the last 9 years.  A slight boost is seen for players drafted in the top 10 and players going to teams with an established number one receiver, two things going in Kevin White’s favor, so expecting that he might put up something in the range of 800-900 yards as a rookie seems reasonable.

Stay tuned for the 2nd half of this article, when I will look at comparables from this list for Kevin White based on physical measurables and college production to see what we might expect from him over the course of his career.

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.

Results

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.

Team by team

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.

Rebound?

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.

No effect

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.

Recently, this tweet from NFL on ESPN was brought to my attention, which contains the following image.

Some people wondered why Jay Cutler, with his reputation for being a turnover machine, was not on this list.  A quick search of statistics indicated Cutler has 89 turnovers in that 5-year span, just missing the cut.  However, total turnovers is a misleading statistic; Cutler has played in only 66 games in that 5-year span, while Brees, Rivers, and Manning have all played 80.  Thus, it will be more accurate to look at the frequency with which turnovers occur.

Turnovers per game

I expanded the search to include all quarterbacks who have been (more or less) full time starters for the last five years, a list that includes 15 quarterbacks.  The table below shows the number of games they have played, the turnovers they have committed, and their turnovers per game in that period.

Here we see that Cutler is among the worst quarterbacks at turning the ball over, but he is certainly not an outlier.  Eli Manning and Carson Palmer both average more turnovers per game than he does, and Ryan Fitzpatrick is very similar to him.

Turnover percentage

Of course, just looking at turnovers per game can be a bit misleading, as some quarterbacks handle the ball more than others.  Therefore, the best way to look at this is by the number of turnovers relative to the number of plays in which turnovers were possible.  Turnovers included both interceptions and fumbles lost, while I counted a quarterbacks’ touches (pass attempts, rushing attempts, or sacks) as their total plays.  Thus, the formula is turnover percentage = (interceptions + fumbles lost)/(pass attempts + rush attempts + sacks).  The table below shows the results.

Here we see Cutler once again is among the worst quarterbacks, and in fact he comes off a little worse in turnover percentage than turnovers per game.  Cutler is still not the worst full-time quarterback in the NFL at turning it over, but he is up there.

Discussion

While there are other factors involved in quarterback play than avoiding turnovers (which is why Peyton Manning is widely considered to be better than Alex Smith), turnovers are certainly very important.  Turnover differential is vital for determining wins in a season and has a very strong correlation to success  in games when the Bears have Jay Cutler under center.

So what can Chicago’s new coaches do to limit Cutler’s turnovers going forward?  One big step will be running the ball more; this limits Cutler’s touches per game, which will limit his turnovers.  Of course, Cutler has averaged only 36.9 touches per game over the last 5 years, 2nd fewest of the 15 quarterbacks in this study.  But that number was at 42.5 in 2014, which would be higher than every quarterback in this study except Drew Brees and Matthew Stafford.  Going back to a more balanced offense like what Cutler saw from 2010-2013 will help some.

One area the Bears can definitely look to improve on is Cutler’s fumbling. His 22 fumbles lost over the last 5 years lead all quarterbacks in this study, and he fumbled on 0.9% of his touches, also the highest mark of any quarterback.  In fact, only Ben Roethlisberger (0.8%) comes even close to that; everybody else was between 0.3% and 0.6%.  Chicago can look to improve this through a combination of better fundamentals and better pass protection, as many fumbles come on sacks.  Cutler has been sacked on 7.5% of his dropbacks over the last 5 years, which is far too high a number. As an added bonus, a more balanced offense, like we discussed before, can slow down the pass rush as well.

Conclusion

Jay Cutler turns the ball over too much.  This is not a shock to anybody, but the numbers say he has a few peers with similar turnover rates.  No matter what Chicago’s new coaches do to help Cutler improve, he is always going to turn it over more than you would like; it’s in his DNA as a gunslinger quarterback.  They should be able to help a bit by focusing on running the ball and pass protection, but Cutler’s high turnover rate is a big part of the reason why he is unlikely to be in Chicago for more than the next 2 years.

“You can’t win with Jay Cutler.”

That’s been a common argument by many fans fed up with Cutler, who was the poster child of a disappointing 2014 year, as they campaigned for the Bears to move on and find a fresh face for the 2015 season.

Since then, the Bears have committed to Cutler as their quarterback for 2015.  So let’s get away from the debate about whether or not that was a good idea (I believe reasonable arguments can be made for both sides) and instead focus on how Chicago can maximize their 2015 success with Cutler under center.

Contrary to what some might say, the Bears have actually won with Cutler in the past, as they are 44-38 in games he has started, but their winning percentage in games he plays in each season has fluctuated from 33% to 70%. Let’s take a look at what changed in seasons where the Bears won with Cutler compared to times when they lost with him in an effort to figure out how they can win with him again in 2015.

Methods

In an effort to try and figure out what changed in those seasons, I looked at the correlation between Chicago’s win percentage in games Jay Cutler started for his six seasons in Chicago and 12 different variables across a number of general areas.  In order to evaluate Cutler’s performance, I examined passer rating, touchdown percentage, interception percentage, and touchdown/interception ratio.  Since the average NFL passer rating has increased by about 6 points in those 6 years, I used the difference between Cutler’s passer rating and the NFL average that year.

In order to evaluate the offense as a whole, I looked at their rankings out of the 32 NFL teams in both yards per game and points per game.  In order to evaluate the defense, I looked at their NFL rankings in both yards per game and points per game allowed.  In order to examine the importance of turnovers, I looked at turnovers per game, takeaways per game, and turnover differential per game.  In order to account for the caliber of opponent the Bears faced, I looked at opponent win percentage. In all of these categories, I only included data for the games Cutler started.  For the offensive and defensive NFL ranks, I slotted the Bears where they would have fit based on their per-game stats for this sample set.

For the categories where lower numbers are better, I manually changed the sign of the correlation to accurately reflect the results.  This applied to interception percentage, all of the offensive and defensive rankings, turnovers per game, and opponent win percentage.

Results

The table below shows the correlation between Chicago’s winning percentage in games Cutler starts each season and their performance in the 12 categories for those games.

Discussion

The first and most important point to make here is that correlation does not equal causation.  This is especially true since this data set spans two different coaches who operated with very different philosophies, which can skew the numbers. Only having six years is also a small sample size, which is why I looked at multiple variables in a category when possible.  However, there are still some clear trends that can be seen here, and it seems reasonable to suggest there is some merit to them.

For starters, Chicago’s offensive performance seems to have little to do with their team success when Cutler is under center.  Points per game scored has a low correlation to winning percentage, and offensive yards per game actually has a negative correlation, though again it is fairly small, and I don’t think it means anything.

Likewise, Cutler’s individual performance does not seem to have much impact on Chicago’s overall success with him under center.  The only two factors that have a somewhat meaningful correlation to win percentage are touchdown percentage and interception percentage, but touchdown percentage is actually negatively related to winning percentage.  Opponent win percentage also proved to be negligible.

The two areas that clearly impact the Bears’ winning percentage when Cutler is under center are defensive performance and turnovers, which were also the two hallmarks of Lovie Smith’s teams during Cutler’s first four years in Chicago.  Both defensive categories had a correlation above 0.5, and defensive points per game had a very high value of 0.89, indicating a strong relationship between the defense’s performance and Chicago’s overall winning percentage.

Turnovers are an interesting category to look at, as the biggest knock against Cutler as a quarterback is that he turns it over too much.  Indeed, the largest correlation between Cutler’s performance and Chicago’s success is interception percentage, though a 0.43 correlation is still not overly large.  The turnover differential per game has the largest correlation to team success, though turnovers per game and takeaways per game were both extremely important as well.

One important point to make about turnovers in this case is that they do not only include interceptions; other players can turn the ball over too, and Cutler can fumble the ball away.  Total interceptions and interception percentage are also two very different numbers; Cutler actually threw interceptions at the 2nd lowest rate of his Bears career in 2014 despite throwing the 2nd most interceptions that same season, a reflection of his 561 passing attempts that marked a new Chicago high for him.  Total turnovers had a much higher correlation than interception percentage, which is partially due to fumbles being added in, but it also suggests that the Bears would do well to limit Cutler’s passing attempts and establish a more balanced offense.

Conclusions

While not conclusive by any means, this data suggests that coaches of a team with Jay Cutler as their starting quarterback should focus on defense and turnovers, which can be limited in part by running the ball more.  This is not exactly earth-shattering news, but it is refreshing to see numbers match up with what common sense seems to dictate.  It should also make Bears fans happy to think that Chicago’s coaching hires this offseason indicate a desire to focus on defense and running the ball.

One logical question that can be raised in response to this conclusion is whether Cutler’s contract is too financially cumbersome for the Bears to build a quality defense.  While Cutler’s contract is in line with the quarterback market around the NFL, this is a fair question to ask.  Quarterbacks, especially mid-tier quarterbacks, making as much money as Cutler does are a relatively new occurrence, and early evidence indicates that these salaries may in fact be too cost prohibitive to build a championship-caliber roster around.

Based on that fact alone, I think looking for Cutler’s eventual replacement in one of the next two drafts is an excellent idea.  A solid quarterback on a rookie contract is the biggest bargain in the NFL, and acquiring one in the near future needs to be Ryan Pace’s top priority.  In the meantime, the good news for Bears fans is this: the Bears have won with Jay Cutler before, and there is a clear blueprint they can follow to do it again.

I recently talked about just how quickly the salaries of established quarterbacks are increasing relative to the salary cap.  In it, I found the top 15 or so quarterbacks have salaries that are increasing at a rate disproportionate to the salary cap.

Today, I want to look at the amount of money Super Bowl teams spend on their quarterbacks.  So I looked at the cap hit (as a percentage of the total cap) of the highest paid quarterback on the roster for every Super Bowl participant since 2000, as well as where that ranked among NFL quarterbacks.

A few quick notes:

• Since there have been a few instances of teams having a guy who was not their highest paid quarterback start for them in the Super Bowl, I decided to go with the highest cap hit for a quarterback on the roster instead.
• 2010 is not included because it was an uncapped year.
• All salary cap data from 2000-2009 comes from the USA Today database.  All data since 2011 comes from Spotrac.

The data

There are several interesting tidbits I’d like to point out here.

It is possible for teams to spend a premium on a quarterback and still compete for the Super Bowl.  7 of the 28 teams in the list (25%) had a quarterback who had one of the top 5 quarterback cap hits in the NFL that year and made the Super Bowl, and 4 of those 7 teams won.

This might illustrate Peyton Manning’s career pretty well: he’s the only quarterback taking up more than 12% of his team’s cap to go to the Super Bowl, and he did it twice: once at 14.2% and once at 17.8%.  Both of them dwarfed the 11.8% any other quarterback has accounted for while making the Super Bowl.  Of course, he lost both times, which might reflect that he was taking up too much money, leaving his team weak in other areas.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Seahawks made the Super Bowl in back to back years without a quarterback accounting for even 1% of the cap.  And in both instances their highest paid quarterback was Tavaris Jackson, not Russell Wilson.  That helps explain why they were able to afford so many high quality players at other positions.  Overall, this isn’t really a repeatable pattern, as it’s extremely rare to land a quarterback outside of the first round of the draft who plays at such a high level so quickly.  When that happens, your team basically gets an extra 10% of the cap to work with over everybody else.

How much is too much?

So how much is too much to pay a quarterback?  That’s the question teams are going to have to answer in the coming years as quarterback contracts continue to climb.

The answer obviously varies depending on the caliber of quarterback.  Somebody like Peyton Manning deserves to be paid more than Matthew Stafford.  But no quarterback in the NFL, no matter how good, has won a Super Bowl in the last 15 years while using up more than 12% of his teams’ salary cap.  Of course, with quarterback contract inflation, that may not hold, as nine quarterbacks are currently slated to have a cap hit of at least 12% of their teams’ total cap ($17.2M) in 2015, including presumed Super Bowl contenders like Green Bay and Denver.

I am skeptical that a middle of the road quarterback like Stafford (or Alex Smith, Jay Cutler, Andy Dalton, Colin Kaepernick, etc.) can win a Super Bowl while on a contract paying him more than 10% of his teams’ salary cap.  I am also skeptical that anybody can win a Super Bowl when their quarterback’s cap hit is astronomical, such as we see in 2015 with Drew Brees (18.5%, $26.4M) or Tony Romo (19.4%, $27.8M).

In my opinion, it’s not a coincidence that we are seeing players like Tom Brady and Peyton Manning take contracts, pay cuts, or restructures that keep their cap hits a little lower.  Brady won his 4th Super Bowl in 2014 with a deal that guarantees him almost all his money but never puts his cap hit above $16 million.  Manning just agreed to come back to Denver on a reduced contract that dropped his cap hit to $17.5 million.

Tipping point reached?

Between those moves, the financial disarray teams like Dallas and New Orleans are in due to absurd quarterback contracts and restructures, and the pay-as-you-go deals signed by Colin Kaepernick and Andy Dalton last offseason, I can’t help but wonder if we have reached a tipping point with quarterback contracts.  They have absolutely exploded in the last 3-4 years, and teams might be starting to realize they overpaid.

I wouldn’t be surprised if teams make more of a concerted effort towards more reasonable quarterback contracts going forward, but that is going to be difficult to do, as players typically like to be paid more than the guy before them was (as we just saw with Ben Roethlisberger’s new deal, which set several records).  With Eli Manning, Philip Rivers, Cam Newton, Russell Wilson, and Andrew Luck all coming up on new deals in the next 12 months, it will be fascinating to see if the quarterback market continues its (possibly counterproductive) upward trajectory, flattens out, or begins to decrease.

As I recently discussed when talking about Jay Cutler’s contract, quarterbacks are becoming very expensive in the NFL.  There are 17 quarterbacks with a cap hit of $14 million or more in 2015, a number that might increase as players like Andrew Luck and Russell Wilson look for extensions this offseason.  With a salary cap of $143 million, that means more than half the teams in the NFL have at least 10% of their salary cap devoted to their starting quarterback.

That seems like an awfully high number to me, so I want to look back and see how that has changed through the years.  The NFL salary cap started in 1994, but I was only able to find salary cap data back to 2000 online, so that’s how far this study goes.

The logistics

Since the NFL salary cap has risen from $62.2 million in 2000 to $143.3 million in 2015, using raw cap numbers obviously isn’t going to be feasible.  In order to adjust for salary cap inflation, I will be looking at the percent of the total cap quarterback cap hits use.

All salary cap data from 2000-2009 comes from the USA Today database.  All data since 2011 comes from Spotrac.  2010 was not included in the study for two reasons: that was an uncapped year, and I couldn’t find the necessary data.

I looked at the top 32 cap quarterback cap hits for each year from 2000 to 2015 (excluding 2010).  The 2015 data is included so as to show how the trends are continuing, but it should be noted that not all of the top 32 quarterback contracts have currently been signed.  That data set does not include any free agent contracts from 2015, and two rookie quarterbacks are likely to add to the mix as well.  This won’t impact the top 20 or 25 quarterback cap hits, but it might factor into the bottom part of the top 32.  Note the data was also compiled before Ben Roethlisberger’s recent contract extension, and does not include that.

The data

Overall, the average cap hit of the top 32 quarterbacks has increased from 5.6% in 2000 to 8.4% in 2015.  This number actually stayed fairly constant from 2000-2008, then it took a big jump in 2009, backed down slightly, and has been steadily rising since 2012.

The jump in 2009 was due to a combination of ridiculous rookie deals (Ben Roethlisberger, Eli Manning, JaMarcus Russell, Carson Palmer, and Philip Rivers were all among the top 10 quarterback cap hits on their rookie deals) and big contracts for star veterans like Peyton Manning, Donovan McNabb, Brett Favre, and Tom Brady.  The other player among top 10 cap hits was Matt Cassel, who received a laughably large contract from Kansas City after they acquired him via trade.

As the rookie contracts expired and were replaced by rookie on reasonable deals, the average quarterback cap hits took a slight dip (though still higher than 2000-2008 levels) in 2010 and 2011.  Over the last 3 years, they have been rising very rapidly, and 2015 (which will end up slightly higher than 8.4% due to the reasons I stated above) makes it look like that trend will continue.

However, this has not been a case of all contracts being inflated evenly, as you can see when you spread out the data.  This is illustrated quite clearly by the graph below, which tracks the cap hits by year for the highest quarterback, 5th highest, 10th highest, and so on every 5.

Here you can see that the growing gap in quarterback cap hits between the 15th and 20th highest paid quarterbacks.  The top 15 or so quarterbacks are all seeing their salaries skyrocket, while the rest are staying relatively constant, once you account for inflation.

Clear dropoff

Why the clear distinction?  Well, here is a list of the guys currently on big contracts ($15 million or higher average salary per year): Aaron Rodgers, Matt Ryan, Joe Flacco, Drew Brees, Colin Kaepernick, Jay Cutler, Tony Romo, Matthew Stafford, Alex Smith, Peyton Manning, Carson Palmer, Eli Manning, Andy Dalton, Philip Rivers, Ben Roethlisberger, and Tom Brady.

The other 16 teams in the league either have quarterbacks on rookie deals or are looking at starting players like Chad Henne, Brian Hoyer, Josh McCown, Ryan Mallett, Ryan Fitzpatrick, or similar guys.  You get the idea.

This is why there’s a gap in average contract value (excluding rookie deals) from about $15 million a year to roughly $5 million a year (Josh McCown, Matt Cassel), with only Matt Schaub’s soon to be expired $7 million a year contract in the middle.

If you have one of the guys in the first group, you are ok at quarterback.  Sure, you could do better than many of them, but you could do a whole lot worse, and teams are putting a premium price on that reliable production, even if it is only reliably average.

Is it worth it?

Now we are presented with the (multi) million dollar question: is it worth paying the lowest guys in that solid group such significant money to be average?  Are players like Jay Cutler, Colin Kaepernick, Alex Smith, Carson Palmer, Andy Dalton, Eli Manning, Joe Flacco, and Matthew Stafford really worth committing more than 10% of your salary cap to?

Stay tuned for my next article in this series, when I will look at some recent trends around the NFL to see what the early results might suggest.

Jay Cutler is overpaid and underproducing.

That’s one of the main arguments against Cutler: he was the highest paid player in the NFL last year (even though his cap hit was 3rd highest among quarterbacks), and he stinks.  It’s the reason the Bears need to get rid of Cutler, and the reason nobody will trade for him.

Remember talk of the Bears having to give away a high draft pick to get somebody to take on Cutler’s contract back in December?  That was laughable, and here’s why: the truth of the matter is that Jay Cutler’s contract is right in line for who he is as an NFL quarterback, especially now that 2014 is out of the way on his front-loaded deal.

Don’t believe me?  Let’s take a closer look at how Cutler’s deal compares to the rest of the league’s quarterbacks over the next two years.

2015

Jay Cutler’s 2015 cap hit is $16.5 million, which is 11th in the NFL among quarterbacks.  This is definitely high, but consider that quarterbacks like Russell Wilson, Andrew Luck, Cam Newton, and Ryan Tannehill are still operating on rookie deals that prevent them from being paid big money.

Even with that, there are 17 quarterbacks in the NFL with a cap hit of $14 million or more in 2015, and 3 with a cap hit greater than $20 million. Eli Manning ($19.8M), Matthew Stafford ($17.7M), and Sam Bradford ($16.6M) all have higher cap hits than Cutler despite being very similar to him statistically (or worse, in Bradford’s case).  The next two quarterbacks after him are Alex Smith ($15.6M) and Colin Kaepernick ($15.3M). Carson Palmer ($14.5M) also checks in within $2 million of Cutler, as does Joe Flacco ($14.6M), who has a low cap hit that will come back to bite Baltimore in the future, as we’ll see in a minute.

2016

Cutler is currently slated to be 9th among quarterbacks with a $17 million cap hit.  But that does not include Ben Roethlisberger, Cam Newton, Eli Manning, Philip Rivers, Russell Wilson, Andrew Luck, or Ryan Tannehill, who all have contracts that expire following the 2015 season.  Several of those players will end up leapfrogging Cutler, which should end up putting him in the 12-15 range.

If you assume all seven of the players I listed will have cap hits of $15 million or greater in 2016 (a reasonable assumption, though it’s possible a few may have backloaded deals that don’t have the cap hit that high in 2016), that makes 18 quarterbacks with cap hits of $15 million or more (5 above $20 million), with 2 more coming in at more than $13 million.  Cutler’s cap hit of $17 million will be behind Joe Flacco ($28.5M-have fun with that!), Matthew Stafford ($22.5M), and Alex Smith ($17.8M), and right ahead of Colin Kaepernick ($16.8M).

Cost of doing business

In other words, Cutler is getting paid right about what he should be based on the quarterback contract landscape around the NFL.  Quarterbacks are ridiculously important, and are therefore ridiculously expensive.  If you have a Jay Cutler (or Andy Dalton, Colin Kaepernick, Matthew Stafford, Alex Smith, Carson Palmer…), you’re paying him a bare minimum of $15 million a year to stick around.  Otherwise you get to try your luck with the Josh McCowns and Brian Hoyers of the world or try and strike lightning in the draft.  Welcome to the modern NFL.

An added bonus of Cutler’s contract is that it never has a balloon year that destroys the cap like Tony Romo ($27.8M in 2015), Drew Brees (average of $26.9M next 2 years), or Joe Flacco ($28.6M in 2016).  Those types of years give the player all the leverage for a favorable re-working of the deal that guarantees more money and moves it to the future, making it extremely cost prohibitive to move on from the player if their play declines (or forces you to swallow a lot of dead money after they retire).

The Bears (or any team they trade Cutler to) can decide to move on with only $2 million in dead money after 2016, which follows two years of very reasonable cap hits (as I have outlined above).  And his cap hits don’t balloon much after that either, as it doesn’t go above $17 million until 2019, at which point Cutler will be 36 and all the dead money in his deal will be gone.  It’s impossible to predict for sure right now with so many new deals to be signed, but it seems highly likely Cutler’s cap hit will not be in the top 10 among quarterbacks in any of the next 4 seasons.

Suffice it to say that Cutler’s contract is certainly not going to have much negative impact on his trade value, should the Bears decide to trade him.  Anybody looking to get an established quarterback like Cutler is going to pay him very close to that amount anyway.

Not great value

Please don’t take this to mean that I think the Bears must stick with Jay Cutler, or that he provides great value, or that he is a great quarterback.  I think Cutler is an average starting quarterback, but the important point is that he is paid like an average starting quarterback.  Whether or not giving an average quarterback that kind of money is a good idea remains to be seen (I have my doubts), but there is really no denying that his contract is pretty much in line with the current quarterback market.

This is not to say that Cutler’s contract is a bargain.  You can certainly make a statistic argument that Cutler has not produced even to the level of the 15th best quarterback in the NFL, which is roughly what I argue he will be paid like over the next few years.  I personally tend to think Cutler is in a group of quarterbacks who fall roughly in the 14-20 range, which makes his contract about right, but you could argue he’s still a little overpaid. Even if you believe that, understand he’s still not absurdly overpaid, and that there are similar quarterbacks to Cutler with similar contracts.

Of the current quarterbacks signed past their rookie deal, the only two I would classify as bargains are Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers.  Brady’s cap hit averages only $15 million a year for the next three years, a bargain for one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. Rodgers comes in at around $19 million a season for the next 3 years, but his consistently high level of play makes him well worth that.

Brady and Rodgers, however, are the exception, not the rule.  It’s not fair to compare Cutler’s contract to theirs while ignoring the majority of deals that set the quarterback market and show quite clearly that Cutler’s contract is not unreasonable.

What should Bears do?

Now that we have that cleared up, it is a fair question to ask if Chicago would be better off trading Cutler and trying to start over with a new quarterback in the draft.  That is an interesting debate with valid arguments to be made on both sides, but it is outside the scope of this article.

All I ask is that you please stop listening to the lazy media narrative, examine the facts, and stop incorrectly calling Jay Cutler the most overpaid player in the league.  He was overpaid in 2014, but the rest of his contract now looks surprisingly reasonable.

“If only our guys had stayed healthy.”

This common lament from NFL fans at the end of a disappointing season reflects the harsh reality that injuries are an unavoidable part of football.  I don’t particularly like using injuries as an excuse, but there is no denying that the health (or lack thereof) of certain key players can have a dramatic impact on a team’s fortunes in a season.

With that in mind, I thought I’d take a look at how the Bears were affected by injuries in 2014.  When I do this study, I examine four different metrics.  No one of them is perfect , but together they should give you a pretty good idea of how badly the Bears were impacted by injuries.  Before we get to the numbers, let’s take a minute to briefly explain each method.

Procedure

The first metric I examined was games missed due to injury.  This simply counts any time a player on the roster is ruled inactive for a week due to an injury.  This is useful for seeing how much injuries impacted the roster as a whole, but completely ignores the value of a player.  A superstar quarterback missing a game means a lot more to the team than a fringe roster player who only plays on special teams, but they both count the same here.

The second metric, therefore, is starts missed.  This looks only at games missed due to injury by players expected to be starters with a fully healthy team (so the standard eleven on offense and defense, plus a third wide receiver and cornerback).  This helps distinguish in player value a little bit, but still treats all starters equally when in fact that is not close to being accurate.

The third metric looks at starts missed by Pro Bowl performers, that is, players who have made a Pro Bowl in the last 2 years playing for their current team.  The idea here is to look at players who are high-impact starters expected to be the best players on the field.  The flaws are that the Pro Bowl voting system is far from perfect, and again, there is still a difference in value between a star receiver like Brandon Marshall  and a nice cornerback like Tim Jennings, both of whom qualified as Pro Bowl players here.

Finally, I looked at money lost due to injuries, assuming each players gets 1/16^th of his cap for the season per game.  So if a player has a cap hit of $16 million for the year and missed one game due to injury, the team just “lost” $1 million.  The general idea is that teams pay their better players more money, but there will always be guys who are overpaid or underpaid, sometimes dramatically.  Players who particularly get overlooked here are young players playing well on relatively small rookie contracts.

So again, let me emphasize that no one approach is perfect here. Different teams will appear to have larger injury issues than they actually did (or vice-versa) if you look only at one of the four metrics, but looking at all four should generally give us a solid idea of how the Bears fared overall.  I should also mention that all salary cap numbers come from Spotrac and all injury information is from Pro Football Reference.

Results

Here are the totals for all four categories for the Bears.  I did this same study in 2013 with all 4 NFC North teams, which can be seen here.  For comparisons’ sake, I put up the NFC North average from 2013, the NFC North high from 2013, and Chicago’s totals from 2013.

Conclusion

All of the categories except Pro Bowl starts show the Bears being significantly impacted by injuries in 2014.  And none of these totals include the high amount of players who played through injuries that clearly hampered them, including Chris Conte, Brandon Marshall, Alshon Jeffery, Kyle Fuller, Jared Allen, Jordan Mills, and Jermon Bushrod.

The offensive line was particularly decimated, totaling 45 games and 30 starts lost.  This might help explain some of the offense’s struggles in 2014; it all starts up front.

I find the low number of Pro Bowl starts lost interesting.  It seems like the Bears lost a lot of high-impact (or at least highly paid) players, but it’s telling that few of them were Pro Bowlers recently.  The only players they have who made the Pro Bowl for the Bears in the last two years are Alshon Jeffery, Brandon Marshall, Kyle Long, Matt Forte, Martellus Bennett, and Tim Jennings, and those players stayed fairly healthy (or at least didn’t miss many games) in 2014.

I wish I had numbers from more teams to compare these to, but I simply don’t have the time to compile them for other teams.  Looking at them compared to the NFC North teams in 2013 suggests to me that the Bears were impacted by injuries more than average in 2014, but I don’t have a large enough data set to state that conclusively.

Don’t take this as an argument that the Bears would have been a great, or even good, team in 2014 if they had stayed healthy.  They had a number of problems, including too many overpaid players, excessively poor coaching, too many injuries, and not enough depth to compensate for those injuries.  Injuries certainly played a role in their struggles, but ultimately injuries are a part of football, and good teams need to find a way to overcome them.

One of the interesting decisions new general manager Ryan Pace will face this offseason is what to do with Alshon Jeffery.  Jeffery has one year remaining on his rookie deal, a time when many players sign their first big extension if they have already proven to be quality performers that the team wants to lock up for their prime.

Jeffery certainly qualifies after combining for 174 catches, 2,534 yards, and 17 touchdowns the last few seasons.  So at first glance, locking up Jeffery to a long-term extension makes absolute sense, and I’m sure Pace will have discussions with Jeffery’s agent about an extension this offseason.

Financial details

What will be important in those discussions is how much money Jeffery’s side asks for. He could look at Brandon Marshall’s deal from last year, which averages $10 million a year and guaranteed $22.3 million, as a baseline.  The Bears could point out that Marshall was a more proven receiver than Jeffery at the time of extension, but Jeffery can counter by pointing to the fact that he is much younger, meaning the team would be paying for his prime instead of later years.

The ideal contracts Jeffery’s side will likely try to compare to are those of Mike Wallace, Percy Harvin, and Dwayne Bowe.  These were all signed by players around Jeffery’s age by players less accomplished than Jeffery, and all have an average salary of $10.7 million or greater with a large amount of guaranteed money.

Of course, two of those three contracts were given in free agency rather than re-signing with your own team, and deals tend to work higher in free agency. Bowe, the only player who re-signed with his current team, was an impending free agent, so he had more leverage than Jeffery, who has one year left on his contract.

Closest Comparisons

The closest comparisons to Jeffery’s situation in the NFL recently have been Victor Cruz and Antonio Brown.  Both signed extensions with their current clubs with one year left on their rookie deals.  Brown signed a 5 year, $42 million deal with $8.5 million guaranteed before the 2012 season, while Cruz signed a 5 year, $43 million deal with $15.6 million guaranteed prior to 2013.

Jeffery is more proven than Brown was at the time of his signing, and that deal was 3 years ago.  Cruz is a closer comparison, as both players had similar numbers prior to their extensions, so we’ll use that deal as a baseline.  The 2013 NFL salary cap was $123 million, while 2015 is expected to be $140 million.  Adjusting for inflation, we’ll approximate a Jeffery extension to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 years, $49 million, with $18 million guaranteed, though it could end up higher than that.

Fundamental flaw

Add in the remaining 1 year and $1.5 million remaining on Jeffery’s rookie deal, and that means his total contract for the Bears would be roughly 6 years and $50 million.  This is a fairly conservative scenario, as I would not be surprised to see that sneak closer to $10 million a year than the $8.3 million per year that estimate provides.

There are a number of ways you can structure a deal, which could be back-loaded to keep early cap numbers low, but let’s assume Jeffery’s contract has roughly an $8 million cap hit in both 2015 and 2016.  Now let’s factor in the cap hits of Jay Cutler, Brandon Marshall, and Martellus Bennett to see how much money Chicago would have invested in their primary passing game components for the next 2 years (using estimated cap figures of $140 million for 2015 and $150 million for 2016).

That’s an awful lot of money when you consider that the best Chicago’s passing offense can reasonably be expected to be at that point is a lower-level top 10 passing attack.  No matter how high or low your opinion of Jay Cutler, he is never going to perform at a top 5 level in the NFL, so you’re paying huge money to have good but not great production.

Options abound

Is that a reasonable path to team success?  That is what Pace must balance when considering what to do with Cutler and Marshall and their contracts and how to handle Alshon Jeffery.  There are massive needs on this roster that need to be addressed, and spending so much money on the passing attack may leave them underfunded.

So what should Pace do?  I see a number of options that will get some sort of value from Jeffery, each of which have their pros and cons.

1. Trade Jeffery for multiple picks, spend that money elsewhere, and hope you can build a good team sooner rather than later.
2. Let Jeffery play out his rookie deal, spend that money elsewhere this year, and face the likelihood of having to pay Jeffery more after 2015 (especially after receivers like Dez Bryant and Randall Cobb get new contracts this offseason).
3. Give Jeffery an extension now, but backload it so the cap hits remain low until after some of those other deals are off the books and then balloon up to high levels.
4. Give Jeffery a balanced extension now and focus on rebuilding elsewhere through the draft.  Use the money freed up when those other deals come off the books to pay guys you draft now when it’s time to pay them in a few years.
5. Cut Brandon Marshall and use that money to sign Alshon to an extension.  Save the rest of your money for fixing the defense.

Personally, I like option 4 the best, but that has some negative short-term ramifications that could make it unattractive to a new general manager trying to establish some job security.  The only way the Bears would be likely to field a playoff team in the next 2 years under that method is if the general manager has some excellent defensive drafts to rebuild a unit that has been among the worst in the NFL the last two years.