kearly":g2qwbhr8 said:
The funny thing about these contracts for NFL players is how they are an inexact science. Baseball has Wins above Replacement (WAR), and it's a very simple calculation to figure out how many millions of dollars 1 WAR is worth.
Fuzzy math alert.
I love Byron Maxwell, but how many 'wins' is he worth on his own? Maybe half a win if we are being generous? How about KJ Wright, a quarter win perhaps? How Cliff Avril? Maybe half a win?
Add those players up, and you get a total AYP of $24.35 million, which buys you probably about 1.25 wins.
By contrast, Seattle was a 7 win team before Wilson, and has averaged 12 wins per year with him, a difference of 5 wins. You can't give Wilson ALL the credit for that difference, but it's probably safe to say that Wilson is a 4 win player.
Okay, I'll bite. By replacement player, are you talking average NFL starter, or are you talking RJ Archer?
I don't know that the "replacement level" premise works the same way, as there is basically zero chance that you would call a guy up from the Arena League and insert him into your starting lineup.
Tarvaris won 7, right? Since then, we have improved at 19 of the 22 starting positions, and have improved at all 31 of the other depth spots.
I would bet good money that Tarvaris would have won AT LEAST ten games with our current roster last season. Does that seem fair?
And Tarvaris by all accounts is below the average NFL starter, correct?
Go back through the games from last year. What four games did we win because we had Russell Wilson that we wouldn't have won with a league average starting QB?
Andrew Luck has proven that he can take an otherwise mediocre at best roster, put an entire team on his shoulders, and get them to a AFC title game. You pay a guy that can do that, unquestionably.
I'm not saying Russell can't do that. I'm just saying that if you pay Russell, there is a bit of an educated guess and hope that he would be able to do the same thing, simply because he hasn't been asked to do it before. Our roster is undoubtedly going to start to become thinner if we give our QB a 25 million per year raise. So it really comes down to this question...do you believe Russell is going to be supremely successful when he isn't on the best roster in the league?
Because I am a little worried about what I believe might be an issue with, and lack of shown improvement in correctly diagnosing blitzes and coverages, and because of what paying a huge money to a QB does to the future success of your franchise, as beaten to death in other threads, I would not personally make Russell Wilson one of the highest paid QB's in the NFL. Run-on sentence be damned.