It seems like everyone's way to manage the cap is to get a top talent superstar at #1 and a minimum wage backup at every position and pray no one gets hurt.
Once you get past the QB position, where having a good one is essential to winning as everybody knows, there's a vast expanse between that player and the minimum salary bench players who don't make the 45 man game day roster. As demonstrated in several recent Super Bowls, you don't necessarily need a great QB to get to the big game if you're fielding a great defense, but he must at least qualify as "good". It all starts at the QB position, wherever you may find him.
Further, you can't expect to consistently populate the roster with superstars out of your #1 picks if you are consistently picking from the mid-20's spots on down. If you consistently get just core players by year 2 from those draft positions you're way ahead of the league average, with the emphasis on "consistently". In most drafts, there's not a lot to differentiate the 25th. pick from the 50th. except need, scheme fit or unusual value created by a particularly deep player position in the draft. And if a deep draft position also happens to be a position of roster strength already, it's not going to be exploitable. I think we can put to bed the "best player available" Thompson fallacy. That view may have had some validity in his earlier years of roster building; he's been as much a need picker as anybody on day 1 of the draft in recent years in an effort to fix glaring problems in order stay near the top.
You might also be thinking of a certain team securing a Hall of Fame QB with the 24th. pick. Whether that was the result of a rare visitation from the scouting muses providing some flash of insight or just plain luck (likely some of both), it's a rare and fortuitous occurrence not likely to be repeated at other positions in other years.
The impact of the rookie salary scale implemented with the 2011 collective bargaining agreement is often underappreciated as a key to roster building. The landscape changed entirely 5 years ago. Once you have your QB, a key to cap efficiency (and thereby a key to winning) is who you have on your roster from the previous 3 rookie classes plus the current year's rookies. In a draft-and-develop approach, which no one takes to a further extreme than Thompson, it's
the key to building that vast ground between the great QB and the bottom of the roster.
All draftee contracts are for 4 years, 3 years for undrafted rookies with meaningful restrictions on their earning power in year 4 even if they pan out. Those contracts are cheap. Even a merely decent starter coming out of the low first round is dirt cheap in his first 4 seasons. Further, a rookie contract cannot be renegotiated or extended until after the 3rd. year per the CBA. So even if you get lucky with an immediate superstar, he has to wait.
An extreme illustration would be the two Seattle Super Bowl teams where the cap hit for Wilson, Wagner and Sherman was less than $4 mil per year
combined. None were 1st. round picks. It doesn't matter where in the draft you find star players, or even solid starters, so long as they emerge early. Now in their second contracts, those three players will count $39 million against the cap in 2016. Are you going to get better play out of these guys in 2016 than you did in 2014? I don't see how that could happen. So there's a huge gap to fill, a cap equivalent of 3 Pro Bowl level veterans you might buy in free agency, or a wide assortment of lesser vets. The only way to cover that gap is to draft well, replenishing the supply of good, cheap players. That could be over the future 2 years in this case, or it could also include the prior year or two with young quality on the bench stuck behind vet starters who are now ready to play and play well.
Let's take a more typical example that's close to home: Damarious Randall.
As the #30 pick, the rookie salary scale brought him in with the following cap hits in millions over the first 4 years: $1.4, $1.8, $2.2 and $2.5, in that order. Good rookie year, with the look of having some upside still to go. Good pick even if a "superstar" projection seems unrealistic.
Let's forget the Randall's rookie year and upside for a moment and imagine the same guy playing exactly the same way in his 4th. season entering free agency. Would he get paid at least the equivalent of House in free agency to play #2 perimeter corner? You'd have to think so. House's cap number in millions over the 4 years of his current contract are $6.5, $6.0, $6,0, $6.0. You'd have to say the cumulative cap advantage at that one position for the Packers over the Jags is at least $4 mil per year for 4 years.
And that's just one player.
You could go toward the bottom of the roster and look at a guy like Ripkowski. Good contributor on special teams. His cap number over 4 years is $2.4 mil. You could be paying double that or more for a 5th. season career special teamer. He presents value over 4 years even if he never takes a snap from scrimmage. Or how about Janis? Even just playing gunner he's a bargain compared to the $2 mil per year Bush got to play the same position with comparable if not better play from Janis.
The point being, in the vast roster expanse between the QB and 46th. player, the key is maximizing contract value in the other 44 players, i.e., getting cumulative performance above the cumulative cap, and the best place to find it is in the rookie contracts. The more favorable value propositions you accumulate, from the top to the bottom of the roster, and the fewer value proposition busts you carry, the better you'll be.
