Investing too heavily in Free Agency is a bad thing for an NFL team

Free agency in football is a little bit like running the ball. You cannot win without it to some extent, but it’s also fundamentally inefficient. Still, for many fans (and some analysts), a lack of activity in free agency represents something of an offseason failure.

People are more comfortable with players they know and free agents, by virtue of having played in the league for at least a few years, are generally known to fans at large, especially at the skill positions. But as fun as free agency can be, it just isn’t a path to victory because winning in the NFL is almost entirely the result of getting surplus value. Because free agency takes place in the one economic zone of football where players are paid actual market value, it’s difficult to find surplus value there.

But let’s back up for one second. What do I mean by surplus value in the first place? Surplus value is everything Surplus value is one of the most important concepts in all of sports, and even more so in any sport that has any type of salary cap or salary suppression (or both, as is the case in the NFL).

In the age of high-powered computers and advanced analytics, (almost) every front office, regardless of the sport, has some idea about how much a “win” costs in the free agent market (or in draft capital). In the NFL, newly drafted players have their salaries artificially suppressed (especially quarterbacks), and so while in free agency a win may cost X dollars, players on their first contract can provide a win at X/5 dollars, or something along those lines. Since the league has a hard salary cap, every win you generate pre-free agency frees capital to extend valuable current players or make an occasional splash in free agency.