A Push for Patience in Rebuilding

Building a sustainable contender cannot happen in one offseason

As we approach the final month of the 2023 NFL Season, many teams are already out of the hunt for the playoffs. For these fanbases, much of the discourse has turned to the off-season, and how to turn around their teams in anticipation of the 2024 season. Too often though, the discussion centers around the speed of the rebuild and getting to the playoffs as soon as possible. However, spending time looking at the outcomes from the Draft and in Free Agency has given me appreciation for just how hard it is to build a great football team. While it is difficult to get fans to be patient, it is important for owners to entrust their Front Offices to re-build sustainably and methodically - even if it takes time. Teams that find themselves at the very bottom of the standings often have several key holes on their roster, and successfully plugging them is a process that takes several years - not just one off-season. Yet, despite that, NFL GMs have the shortest average tenure across the five largest sports leagues in America - at just 2.1 years. That is not even close to enough time to successfully execute a rebuild and build a sustainable contender.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to a rebuild is how difficult it is to find top-players at premium positions like Quarterback, Left Tackle, and Cornerback. As my look into positional outcomes in the Draft shows, it is rare to find top players at these positions outside the 1st Round. While Free Agency is an option, it is rare that top QBs and LTs hit the open market, and my research on Free Agency finds CBs to be relatively poor signings. If a team is entering a re-build without any of those building blocks, they would need either tremendous luck or multiple 1st round picks in the Draft, to find those players in fewer than three years. Of course, these three positions are not the only ones on a roster, and while it is easier to find players at the others into the mid-rounds of the draft, teams will need to hit on multiple other picks in order to build a contending-caliber roster - especially at other premium positions like Wide Receiver and Edge Rusher. Furthermore, research from PFF has shown that players tend to generate the most surplus value in the third and fourth years of their careers, which makes sense as it takes time for players to develop and reach their full potential. This tells us that building a contending roster means having a talented core of players in their primes - something that takes rookies a season or two to reach. Therefore, it will likely take a team a minimum of 3-4 years of good drafting to see the necessary talent influx to compete deep into the playoffs.

Teams can also add to their roster via Free Agency, and spending big often leads to immediate results. These gains, however, are often unsustainable. The folks over at the 33rd Team did a comprehensive analysis on long-term success and Free Agency spending during the 2022 off-season - looking at the top-3 spending leaders in the 2012-21 off-seasons. The results were not pretty. While they found that 70% of teams analyzed improved their win total the following season, only 33% recorded a winning record in the three seasons following their spending spree. Furthermore, less than half had a winning record the year after Free Agent haul. The results have not gotten better since the study was published. The New England Patriots are another prime example of a team that failed to sustain their gains after their 2021 spending spree - again dropping below .500 last season and almost certain to finish with at least a top-10 pick after this season. In fairness, things seemed to fare better for the other two spending leaders in 2021, the Jaguars and 49ers. 2022 was similarly a mixed bag, with the Jaguars seeming to continue their upward trajectory but the Jets and Bills seeing a jump last season but likely regressing this season. In 2023, only one of the top-6 spenders has a record of .500 at the close of Week 11. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the commonality that 33rd Team found with spending sprees that were a long-term success is that almost all the teams that succeeded had a high-end Quarterback locked up. This is not to say that Free Agency is completely useless in building a team, and in fact, I think spending on players at the less premium positions where contracts are reasonable is a smart move that allows a team to dedicate high draft picks to positions where deals for veterans are larger and thus realize surplus value. And there have of course been countless examples of Free Agents who have played an integral role on contending teams in their playoff runs.

However, I also believe that recent trends in College Football are likely to make Free Agency even riskier. With the additional years of COVID eligibility and now NIL incentivizing players to stay in school for longer, draft prospects might end up a little older than in years prior. A couple articles dove into this phenomenon prior to the 2022 Draft. I also looked at the ages of all draftees, and found that the median age of the prospects in the 2022 and 2023 Drafts was 23, whereas it had usually been 22 and was never higher than 22.5 once the rookie wage scale was introduced in 2013. The average age of the draftees in the past two draft classes, 22.6 in 2022 and 22.7 in 2023, is also slightly higher than in any of the drafts since 2012 - where the average age hovered between 22.2 and 22.5. Notably, this analysis does not include Undrafted Free Agents, some of whom might also be older prospects. While we are likely nearing the end of the COVID classes, as the 2024 draft’s seniors entered college in 2020, we’ve likely only begun to see the impact of NIL (in conjunction with the transfer portal) on when players decide to declare for the draft. Research from PFF tells us that players tend to achieve peak performance around their mid-20s, with player performance peaking at 25 and starting to fall off quickly at 27 or 28. While median prospect age rising by a year may not seem like a big difference, it means these players will also hit Free Agency one year later. Given that it takes 4-6 years for a player to reach Unrestricted Free Agency following their rookie contract and potentially a Franchise Tag, this one year difference in median age means that many players will not be UFAs until they are 27-29. Teams signing these players will therefore get one fewer year of peak production, reducing the value generated from these (often large) investments.

There are so many things that teams need to be able to do at least competently in order to be successful, such as passing the football, protecting the Quarterback, rushing the passer, and holding up in coverage. Assembling the pieces to be able to do all of that requires a lot of high draft picks, good picks throughout the rest of the draft, and sound Free Agent signings and/or trade acquisitions. Building a successful team is furthermore an exercise in assembling a strong core of players in their mid-20s. By the time members of a General Manager’s first draft class reach their primes after 2-3 years, many of the Free Agents signed that off-season will likely be on the back end of their careers. No team will start a rebuild completely bereft of talent, but it will likely take a General Manager a minimum of three years for the players he (or in the future she) brought in to reach their primes. Therefore, Owners should give General Managers 4-5 years of job security to rebuild a team in order to encourage sustainable teambuilding rather than quick fixes that only bring about temporary improvements. Owners should also judge their GMs based on a body of work, and on process rather than entirely on outcome. A General Manager who, for example, whiffed on an early QB pick in their first year, but has since drafted well and brought in other important building blocks does not necessarily deserve to be fired even if the team’s performance does not meet expectations. That hypothetical GM should instead be given the opportunity to correct for the initial mistake instead of being let go, as succeeding on a singular first round pick is far from a surefire thing. Even the best GMs have whiffed on top draft picks in their careers.

Moving on from a GM too early can even further extend the length of a rebuild. The NFL is unique in American sports as it is both hard capped and lacks a minor league system. This eliminates many of the quick fixes that GMs in other sports have like trading prospects for established players or exceeding the luxury tax or soft cap to make signings in Free Agency. Dead cap charges make it more difficult, though far from impossible, to trade or release players who are still talented but no longer an organizational fit than in other sports. Given that GMs and the Head Coaches they hire have different scheme preferences from one another, many even promising players might no longer be a fit in an organization if there is a scheme change. A new GM who comes in and makes a scheme change will have to be patient in letting go of players from the previous regime who are no longer a fit due to dead cap charges, and will take time to stock the cupboard with their own guys. Therefore, new GMs in the NFL likely benefit less from the good moves their predecessors made than in other sports, therefore necessitating a longer rebuild period. Owners should therefore be wary when making a change and determine if starting from scratch will lead to a longer rebuild than letting the existing GM correct earlier mistakes, should they be deemed capable of doing so.

In exchange for greater job security, NFL GMs and Coaches should fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy less frequently. Research from Professor Quinn A.W. Keefer has extensively covered this subject. In a 2015 paper, he found that a 15% increase in a player’s salary cap value, controlling for performance, had the same impact on increasing the number of games started as an increase in 5-11 tackles for Linebackers, 1-2 interceptions for Defensive Backs, and 2-5.5 sacks for Defensive Linemen relative to prior season performance. Keefer further found that the impact was even greater for rookies, showing that teams are overly reluctant to cut bait on underperforming top picks.¹ While it is understandable that teams may not want to lose salary cap space, which often happens when a team moves on from a 1st Round pick in the first two years of their contract, they should still be quicker to move such players that are underperforming to reserve roles until it is palatable cap wise to move on via trade or release. I understand that there might be an apparent contradiction between advocating for moving on more quickly from individual players while pushing for more patience for GMs and Front Offices, but there are far more variables at play in teambuilding and collective performance than with individual player development. Lastly, I believe GMs should be more open to player for player trades when the cap allows, especially when it involves exchanging productive players that are no longer scheme fits. Doing so can allow teams to add to their cores of prime-age players from the get-go while not sacrificing draft capital or key pieces on the roster.

Ultimately, it is important for Ownership and Front Offices to work together as partners in building championship caliber teams. Increased leeway for GMs and Front Offices allows them to avoid fast fixes like Free Agent spending sprees that might prove to be unsustainable in the future and gives them an opportunity to correct for isolated mistakes. Moving on more quickly from players that have proven to be a sunk cost can help free up cash (not necessarily cap space) for owners to then reallocate to other players that are more likely to make an impact. Ultimately, building a great football team is hard, and happens over the course of years - not months. Longer GM contracts are a great way to help recognize this reality. As a general rule, understanding there will be situations that warrant exceptions, I believe that owners should give the GMs they hire at least four years at the helm instead of the current average of 2.1 in order to empower them to rebuild sustainably.

1. Keefer, Q. A., & W. (2015). Performance feedback does not eliminate the sunk-cost fallacy: Evidence from professional football. Journal of Labor Research, 36(4), 409-426. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s12122-015-9215-y