NFL’s All-Bad-Contracts Team.. 1 jet player ~ ~ ~

[kelly]

Every NFL team has a bad contract or two lying around. It’s the nature of the beast when you’re working with 53-man rosters in a league that has an incredibly high attrition rate. Hell, roster building is hard to do in other sports, too; the Warriors and Giants recently won titles with the dismal contracts of David Lee and Tim Lincecum on their respective books, and that was with far smaller rosters in sports where future performance is more consistent and easier to project.

 

This stuff is very difficult, which is why merely looking back and picking out bad contracts with the benefit of hindsight is shooting fish in a barrel. Contracts that seem logical and financially prudent on the day they’re signed can quickly go bad for totally unforeseeable reasons. It took one quarter in 2008 to turn Tom Brady from the most valuable asset in football to, for that season, a sunk cost. It happens.The value in looking back instead comes from trying to examine what was going through a general manager’s mind at the time of a signing to understand what he missed. Usually, these mistakes fall into one of several categories; it’s not that a general manager is stupid or that a player isn’t trying, but instead that teams that are trying to win either trick themselves into ignoring a likely problem or desperately overpay for a level of security that isn’t there.

 

When I’ve compiled All-Bad-Contracts Teams in the past (beginning in 2013 and then again last year), I’ve mentioned that there are five archetypes that frequently pop up as oft-ignored concerns. One is almost extinct at this point. The overwhelming contracts for players taken in the first round of the draft under the old CBA are basically gone, since the vast majority of 2010 first-round picks who benefited from the previous rookie scale signed new deals this offseason. At this point, we’re down to four players left on those old deals, and none of them (Sam Bradford, Trent Williams, Eric Berry, and Russell Okung) appear on this list.

 

The other four contract problems ? They’re alive and well. Let’s run through them for a refresher :

 

• The Marginal Talent : With the NFL salary cap rising by more than $20 million between 2013 and 2015, teams have had more money to spend than they’ve known what to do with. Well, that’s not true, because they’ve known exactly what to do with it: They’ve spent it on moderately impressive free agents. Every year, a handful of players who were available for nothing as recently as the previous offseason sign with new teams for serious money. Most of the time, they’re about as good as the guys who were freely available.

 

• Paying for the Outlier : It’s almost always foolish to pay for a guy who grossly outstripped his previous level of play for one season, especially if there’s something about his performance that’s likely unsustainable. Did an oft-injured player stay healthy? Did a competent-or-worse player piece together an impressive number of touchdowns or interceptions? What a guy did in 2014 is valuable, but it doesn’t erase what he did over the previous three seasons.

 

• System Guy Out of System : Football is a more scheme-intensive sport than any other major professional endeavor, and the way a player performs on one team is hardly proof that he’ll continue to perform that way on a new team with a different style of play. Once in a while, that can turn out to be a positive, like how the Chargers nabbed Brandon Flowers out of a press scheme in Kansas City and got a far better player by leaving him off the line of scrimmage. More often, teams see a star in one scheme and get disappointed by what he does in another.

 

• Ever Fallen in Love With a Player You Shouldn’t Have ?: Sometimes, the toughest mistake can be with a player you’ve already known for years. Great NFL teams are built around drafting, developing, and retaining talent, so it’s only natural for organizations to want to lock up the players they’ve molded into talented contributors before they hit free agency. Like everything, there’s a price at which even the players you know are no longer worth holding on to. Great organizations manage that line well and trust that they can develop another player at a fraction of the cost; naive organizations desperately cling to the players they know and end up disappointed when they fail to live up to their price tag.

 

Two more things before we get started. First, don’t mistake a bad contract for a bad player. There are plenty of talented players on this list, guys who would be assets for their teams at the right salary. Even a player who hasn’t lived up to his contract deserves the money he’s getting for putting his body on the line week in and week out. The “right salary” here is in context with the other players at his position.The other thing: Once you get on this list, it’s awful hard to get off it. Looking back through last year’s list, I count 10 players who were either cut or retired and three who had to restructure their deals. Only nine of the 22 players from a year ago are still on the same contract, and of those nine, only one — Everson Griffen — would probably be considered a good contract by most observers a year later.

 

Let’s start with the most difficult position to fill, quarterback, where the Browns were stuck between a rock and a hard place and handed out a deal that will probably eventually cost everyone involved their jobs :

 

~ ~ Inside Linebacker : David Harris, Jets

 

Contract Flaw : Ever Fallen in Love With a Player You Shouldn’t Have ?

 

Run-thumping inside linebackers are notably cheap these days, which is why Harris’s deal seems so out of whack. While the similarly skilled Brandon Spikes floundered in the free-agent market,³ the Jets kept Harris out of the shop window by giving him a three-year, $21.5 million deal with a staggering $15 million in guarantees over the next two seasons. Harris has just less than 70 percent of his money guaranteed, while the next closest veteran inside linebacker making more than $5 million per year, Karlos Dansby, is at an even 50 percent. Given how great the Jets defensive line is, this just isn’t a place where they needed to spend money.

 

rest of above article :

>  http://grantland.com/the-triangle/the-nfls-all-bad-contracts-team/

[Jet9]

Grantland is so long winded they make Sperm Edward's posts look like a Cimini tweet.

[Miss Lonelyhearts]

Grantland is so long winded they make Sperm Edward's posts look like a Cimini tweet.

It's actually kind of impressive. I'd have a hard time bumping the word count on a blurb about Harris's contract past 'lol.'

[Beerfish]

The comment is 100% correct about Harris regardless of the writer or organization writing it.

[Villain The Foe]

Grantland is so long winded they make Sperm Edward's posts look like a Cimini tweet.

lol. Oh thats funny! But to Sperms credit, when you get to the end the guy makes sense. 

[ljr]

Prob true ... We were thin and/or long in the tooth at LB heading into this year though

[slats]

I'm sure most fans here guessed the contract before opening the thread. They view Harris as more of an overall leader than just a run stuffing LB, though, and had real concerns that Rex would be looking to poach him. If this is the worst they did contract-wise, I can live with it.

[kelly]

our 2016 draft.. QB & LBs