Correlations of highest paid player by position to team regular season wins

In our initial study of salary cap research we focused on a team's total "cap value" spending by position and how that related to wins, points scored and points allowed. There were generally weak correlations between how much a team paid out to a given position and the results, with kickers, running backs, cornerbacks, tight ends and defensive ends showing the most bang for the buck.

An alternative way of looking at things would be to focus on a team's highest paid player at a position, rather than the cumulative spending. This would essentially reduce the analysis to "are the highly paid players worth the money?" on a league wide, position compared to position basis.

Again, up front we have to make clear that we do not think you will find strong correlations in that the money spent on a player is often money that does not see a good return on investment! This can be due to injuries, the rest of the players or coaching game plans being unable to make best use of the superstar's talents, the lack of drive once a big contract is secured, etc.

Certainly individual teams are much better at judging where to spend the money, and this would be the subject of another article -- which teams get the best return in the areas they sink the most salary dollars? Which teams are able to make do at a position effectively with a lower expenditure than their NFL foes?

Back to the matter at hand however, and how do the highly paid, "franchise" type players perform by position. We display below the correlations to team regular season wins, points scored (loosely "offense"), points allowed ("defense") and the numbers we generated in the first study looking at a team's ranking in total position spending correlated to wins.

So once again, Kickers are the stars of the show (hmmm, surprisingly we've been getting a lot of traffic lately from the NFL boot-swingers and their agents). Running Backs decline quite a bit from their overall positional correlation -- suggesting having depth at the RB spot is important. The offensive line top paid player number is better, giving some credence to those arguing that the left tackle spot (or right tackle for a lefty QB) is your money position. Meanwhile quarterbacks do climb slightly, which makes some sense in that a healthy starting QB will mean little value to a team from a highly paid backup.

What these numbers really tell us is:

• NFL teams are not very successful at delivering results for the big money spent on individual players. This has a fair amount to do with the punishing toll the game takes on players, combined with the fact that unlike a sport such as baseball where individual performance is isolated and easy enough to gauge, the conventional statistics for football players do not accurately depict a player's value.
• There's high risk in general, but more so at some positions over others in spending large chunks of your salary cap space. Kickers represent a fairly safe place to invest since their performance is presumably more predictable from year to year than other positison(and their injury risk less). Highly paid Wide Receivers on the other hand are high risk, and generally losing investments -- probably because for a WR to excel he needs help from the other players on offense more than anyone: the OL has to block, the RB has to run, and the QB has to deliver the ball, while the other receivers must provide a threat the defense has to worry about! If you don't have these other elements in place then a high priced WR salary is going down the drain.

We'll be publishing more articles on this subject in the ensuing weeks.