I want to hopefully outline why I think this chart, specifically the resource score, may have issues. (obviously W-L component is what it is)Moriarty wrote: ↑Fri Jan 14, 2022 1:25 pmEh. Not especially.The Cooler King wrote: ↑Fri Jan 14, 2022 10:49 am
I think his scale is too weighted to draft IMO. Draft capital is generally a long term building block, but then he's also using short term cap number in that resource with an adjustment I think for ability to prorare bonuses. So the Bears have okay cap space, but not a ton of ability to prorare bonuses.
In thr context of thr spending strength for many of those teams just being the ability to "kick thee can", does that make you feel better?
I haven't looked at the details of how they set up the metrics, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if they could be tweaked and improved.
Nonetheless, there's no getting around the facts that:
- The Bears were a bad team last year (26th) https://www.nfl.com/standings/league/2021/REG
(and meaningless late season wins once again made it look better than it was)- The Bears have terrible draft resources to help fix things (29th, nearly half the league median, and about 1/6 of what the Jets have) https://www.tankathon.com/nfl/power_rankings
- The Bears are in a below average cap situation (hard to quantify and online sources vary wildly, but let's guestimate around 17-20th)
There's no honest formula you can whip up where the Bears aren't going to end up solidly in The Bad Quadrant of the graph.
Let's look at Bears-Minn as a comparison. Per his resource metric Minn is basically the mean and Bears are bottom quartile. Some of my data is custom data that I pull and is a little outdated, but should be close enough.
Draft:
Minn has their first and a couple extra late picks. Advantage Minnesota
Projected "Effective Cap space"
Minn is at about (16M) and Bears at ~25M. Advantage Bears.
A metric I'll call "retool flex" which is basically ability to prorate bonuses to defer space. Minnesota has a big $35M Cousins bonus and another 26M in roster bonuses they could defer to "create" more space. Bears only have about 10M in guarantees and another 10M in roster bonuses they can defer. So advantage Minn here, but the context is they are just "kicking the can" . I know this is in his metric, I just don't know to what extent its valued.
Now I'm not shy about deferral techniques, but we gotta look at long term picture here. Minn has guarantees or dead caps in 2022 and future years totalling about 165M. Bears are at 149M, so slight gross flexibility edge already. Some of those guarantees you could get out of via trade, but otherwise the Vikings already have a larger future obligation. This is also backed up with 2023 projected cap space numbers in which the Bears have more projected space. Now the saving grace for Minn is maybe that they have a lot more players under contract than Bears. They actually top my metric for contract years over the next two seasons. So thier spending can go further and is only partially accounted for in effective space.
But taken alltogether, even with the roster spots, them having a median resource is that they can double down on a roster that finished barely ahead of the Bears in the standings. They are already in a worse flexibility spot and have to make it even worse to get out of their current cap hole, let alone use more of it. And while having roster spots under contract helps, I'm not sure it means that much if you finished below 0.500.
So at the end of the day the "resource" score can apparently jump from bottom quarterile to median based on some combo of
1. A first round picks and a Rd 6/7 pick
2. A bunch of big guarantees that you can restructure (without consideration of how leveraged you actually are already).
Seems perhaps those areas are being overrated. Again, Mimn already has an effective cap space hole of 40M compared to Bears.
Based on the Rams ranking I suspect it's an over influence of draft picks. Rams also have a slight negative cap hole, decent flexibility to get out of it with guarantee restructures, but also notably have pretty low future commitments (though part of that is that they'll have to pay Stafford soon). But still, the idea they have the worst resource spot is kind of silly (they currently have only 3 late picks but are scheduled to get 5 comp picks, maybe his formula hasn't accounted for that).
Green Bay also is a huge outlier on his chart. Their resources are BAD this year. A great cap guy on Twitter for example has outlined that they can't even franchise tag Adams without Rodgers restructuring or cut. If Rodgers doesn't want to restructure, they're basically screwed. But I guess they slightly edge the Bears on the basis of being slightly ahead of the Bears in draft capital, despite a 60M effective cap space hole, and being leveraged in future years more than the Bears (which doesn't even include Rodgers being only under contract through 2022).
I just can't resolve Green Bay and Bears as roughly equally resourced constrained, Rams being the most resource constrained, and Minnesota healthily above all 3. Just think his score method may be flawed. I mean he basically created a custom metric off a few different underlying metric, don't think we can assume it has inherent value.
I say that all having liked a lot of this guys charts, and I actually DMed before and he's a nice, smart guy. Just think something is off.