Let Freedom Ring - Busting the Myth of the Salary Cap

[FRPLG]

The intrinsic nature of baseball can be attributed to a larger sample size. The signing of a quality free agent in baseball has approximately 10x the amounts of chances to actually "improve" a team over all. It's all about the sample size. In football free-agents get 16 games to make a difference. Miss a game because of injury...it's like missing 10 games in baseball. Miss 4 weeks...it's like missing 40 games. The small sample size really skews the effects of talent. Similarly like Schneed has pointed out a superior talent that literally wins you two or three games is like signing a baseball player who single-handedly wins you 20-30 games. That doesn't exist. The best players in the history of baseball at best won games for their teams maybe 15 times a year on average.

I think what the author is missing is that potentially the argument isn't about hard/soft/no cap but more about whether it makes financial/logical sense for the likes of NY to compete with the likes of Buffalo in anything. It seems clear that a completely socialistic system would probably kill everything off since Snyder/Jones/Kraft types would stop trying so damn hard to make money(hurting the product in unpredictable but probably catastrophic ways). The mixture approach seems to work in the short run but it has to be managed and tweaked constantly to account for chaning environments and situations. Faced with also trying to appease a demanding players union I think the mixture approach might be doomed to fail in the long run since unions rarely seem to care or even understand complex market equations. It'd very hard to co stantly be finding the right emixture while also keeping the players happy when the players expect to never ever lose money. So it comes to to accepting a complete free market which undoubtedly kills offf the Buffalo types. I think we should should start preparing ourselves for that.

[BigHairedAristocrat]

Originally Posted by FRPLG

So it comes to to accepting a complete free market which undoubtedly kills offf the Buffalo types. I think we should should start preparing ourselves for that.

so what if the buffalo-types are killed off? Football is just entertainment. The purpose of entertainment is to please as many people as possible. Teams like the bills, bengals, jaguars, vikings, etc have very small fan bases when compared to teams like dallas, washington, san francisco, etc.

If theres a system that results in the teams with the larger fan bases winning more... then so what? teams that are in small markets could disappear, but more likely... they would move to a market that has the fanbase to support it. For example, the vikings could move to LA, the Bills could move to Toronto, the Jags could move to mexico, etc.

In the end, there would be no cap, and teams with the most fans would generate the most revenue, and therefore be in good position to improve by spending more money on players. but all 32 teams would still be in a position to remain competitive, since all 32 teams would be geographically located where they would have strong fanbases.

[GTripp0012]

Originally Posted by FRPLG

The intrinsic nature of baseball can be attributed to a larger sample size. The signing of a quality free agent in baseball has approximately 10x the amounts of chances to actually "improve" a team over all. It's all about the sample size. In football free-agents get 16 games to make a difference. Miss a game because of injury...it's like missing 10 games in baseball. Miss 4 weeks...it's like missing 40 games. The small sample size really skews the effects of talent. Similarly like Schneed has pointed out a superior talent that literally wins you two or three games is like signing a baseball player who single-handedly wins you 20-30 games. That doesn't exist. The best players in the history of baseball at best won games for their teams maybe 15 times a year on average.

I think what the author is missing is that potentially the argument isn't about hard/soft/no cap but more about whether it makes financial/logical sense for the likes of NY to compete with the likes of Buffalo in anything. It seems clear that a completely socialistic system would probably kill everything off since Snyder/Jones/Kraft types would stop trying so damn hard to make money(hurting the product in unpredictable but probably catastrophic ways). The mixture approach seems to work in the short run but it has to be managed and tweaked constantly to account for chaning environments and situations. Faced with also trying to appease a demanding players union I think the mixture approach might be doomed to fail in the long run since unions rarely seem to care or even understand complex market equations. It'd very hard to co stantly be finding the right emixture while also keeping the players happy when the players expect to never ever lose money. So it comes to to accepting a complete free market which undoubtedly kills offf the Buffalo types. I think we should should start preparing ourselves for that.

I would say that a player that can make a team two to three wins (consistently) better at football doesn't exist, unless were talking a player like Peyton who is not only the best in the league, but also calls his own plays, giving the offense an advantage even on plays where he doesn't throw.

Let's call Matt Cassel the average NFL quarterback. Probably an assumption on the high end, but it'll do for this point. How many more wins are the Pats worth with Tom Brady?

I tracked down this estimate table from the 2006 season. While some quarterbacks can, in fact, be worth more than 2 wins in a season, those seasons usually either fall in the outlier category, or under the category of Peyton Manning.

Back to Cassel, if we say that he was worth 0 wins above average, and that Tom Brady were, conservatively, the average of the top five QBs in a random year, we could safely say that (all else equal), the Patriots are somewhere between one and two wins better. Probably near 1.5.

Or the baseball equivalent of 15 wins. i. e. one of the best player in the game.

Read more here: This post is pretty simple, but no less brilliant

I should note that in baseball, that 15 wins figure is being compared to replacement level, or freely available talent, where as I'm comparing Brady to a league average QB in the same offense. So it's not exactly apples to apples.

However, the roster limits normally account for this. Football teams tend to roster a backup QB who generally has some playing experience and whom they believe to be better than replacement level. That's not the case in baseball, as the bench players tend to be on par with the best players on the AAA team.