[Preface: With apologies to people those of you who sat through or otherwise already read my NFL Live Blog from Sunday, it is incredibly long, so I thought maybe I should split out individual posts for some of the individual topics I covered. I’ve removed the time-stamps and re-organized a bit, but this is all original, so it obviously may not be as clean or detailed as a regular article (any additional comments I’ll put in brackets or at the end). If this sort of stuff interests you, I will be live-blogging again this Sunday.]
Here’s a brand new (10 minutes old) bar chart from my salary study:
Obv this stuff becomes more meaningful in a regression context, but it’s interesting even at this level.
“Overspending” is the total amount spent above the sum of cap values for all your active players, like “loading up” on one year by paying a lot of pro-rated signing bonuses. For position players, their cap value is the best (salary-based) predictor of their value, so, unsurprisingly, teams with high immediate cap values tend to have the better teams (while total money spent also correlates positively, it’s entirely because it also correlates with total cap value).
What’s interesting about running backs is that RB cap value correlates positively, but signing bonus correlates negatively. My unconsidered interpretation is that RB’s are valuable enough to spend money on when they’re actually good, but they’re too hard to evaluate to try to buy yourself one.