massari":558w3gca said:
I find a lot of the posters who hate the idea of spending big money in FA, are the same ones who liked trading multiple 1sts and a 3rd for a blitzing Safety with a $9M cap hit due to be the highest paid Safety ever. Weird.
In my view the jury is still out on Adams and I'm currently a bit pessimistic, but it is still possible that it could turn out well in a way that I think a "big FA" as discussed here is unlikely to do so. The reason has to do with maximizing value when every team is fixed to the same total salary level.
Most of the positive value on a team is going to come from inexpensive players who outplay their deals. This is hopefully generated by rookie contracts if the team is drafting well, and it could also be cheap FAs such as with Avril/Bennett/McDaniel in the previous discussion. Players that the rest of the league may be undervaluing for whatever reason; injury history, needing a change of scenery, positional change/fit, developmental prospects, veterans who may still have something left in the tank, whatever.
The expensive players need to be a small group of elite players who are truly difference makers. Look back at the LOB Seahawks and you'll see that we identified a small core that we thought were crucial and never let them hit UFA but instead extended them every time; Russ, Marshawn, Doug, Kam, Earl, Bennett, Avril, Sherman, KJ, Bobby. The rest we had to make tough decisions on and let walk to FA, and we certainly missed guys like Tate, Mebane, Clemons, Giacomini, Okung and so on. But we kept the former group and not the latter group because we thought they were the difference makers and the latter group could be replaced.
Every other team is constantly doing this same analysis, and the guys who show up in UFA every year can be very good players but for the most part are not the elite players. And unfortunately, with 32 teams in the league who have different holes and different scouting on the players, it means that many of them end up getting paid like elite players due to the
Winner's Curse. Putting too many of these overpaid "good but not elite" guys on your team instead of the actual elite players is why the top FA spenders tend to be bad teams in a bad cycle until they actually manage to hit on some of their own rookies and turn their fortunes around.
I don't think Guard is one of the most important positions in the NFL, but I would still be happy to break the bank for one if we were getting somebody like Hutchinson or say Quenton Nelson from the Colts. Nelson isn't going to be available anytime soon, however, because the Colts are going to prioritize keeping him around. When you see a UFA who people are touting as a top target the first question you should ask yourself is why their previous team let them walk in the first place.
Bringing it back to Adams, he has the potential to be one of those difference makers that the Seahawks would likely never be in a position to draft and would never hit UFA (until he was well past his prime). Whether that happens or not will determine whether the very expensive price was worth it or not.
