Move Over, Rookies: Midlevel Veterans Are Having a Moment
The NFL keeps getting younger, but the oldest teams are winning Super Bowls, which has led coaches and general managers to turn to an undervalued resource to build their rostersMove Over, Rookies: Midlevel Veterans Are Having a Moment
The NFL keeps getting younger, but the oldest teams are winning Super Bowls, which has led coaches and general managers to turn to an undervalued resource to build their rosters
The NFL is valuing youth and innovation more than ever before. A year after the Rams made Sean McVay the youngest head coach in league history, Patrick Mahomes became the youngest MVP winner since Dan Marino. This offseason, an avalanche followed: The Cardinals threw caution to the wind and paired Kliff Kingsbury with Kyler Murray, the Packers ended the Mike McCarthy era, and the Bengals poached the Rams’ quarterbacks coach to be their new head coach. When did the NFL begin to resemble Silicon Valley? Welcome to Wunderkind Week, when we’ll dive deep into how the NFL became a young man’s league.
There is a metric called snap-weighted age that goes a long way toward telling the story of what is happening in football. Developed by Football Outsiders in 2012, it measures the average age of an NFL team adjusted for how many snaps each player plays during the season. In 2018, that number hit a record low—26.5 years old—for the third straight year.
Countless factors led to this moment: The rookie wage scale instituted in the 2011 NFL Players Association collective bargaining agreement, which makes players selected in the first round cheaper, is probably the biggest culprit, but certainly not the only one. College players—more prepared for the pros and incentivized to get into the league earlier to get to their second contract sooner—are entering the draft early in record numbers. There were 135 early entrants in this year’s draft—up from 119 the year before—and a new mark is set seemingly every year, much like snap-weighted age averages. College schemes trickled up to the NFL, which favored younger players who excelled at running them. And then there’s the simple answer that some young players are just awesome: Patrick Mahomes’s $4.5 million cap hit is extremely valuable to the Chiefs; Alvin Kamara at $1.1 million isn’t a bad deal for the Saints, either.
The most valuable piece when building an NFL roster continues to be a great young player who is cost-controlled through the first five years of his career. Until there’s a dramatic change to how players are paid, this will remain true. By now, we know the reasons for this trend—I’ve written about them plenty of times—but we’re beginning to see how smart teams have reacted to it. Great teams like the Patriots and the Eagles have already learned a valuable lesson: Veteran players on manageable second contracts are underrated assets in an increasingly young era.
And in numerous interviews with coaches and decision-makers, I’ve found that the middle-class veteran is back en vogue for many other teams as well.
An obsession with cheap, young players defines this modern era of the NFL, but Football Outsiders’ data contains a strange revelation: The teams that win the Super Bowl are old. All but one Super Bowl winner since the 2011 CBA has been ranked in the top 10 of the league’s oldest teams, according to snap-weighted age. Only the 2013 Legion of Boom Seahawks won a Super Bowl while fielding a roster ranked in the youngest half of the league. Last year’s Super Bowl participants, the Patriots and Rams, ranked last and next-to-last, respectively, in the amount of snaps taken by rookies, according to Pro Football Focus. The Rams were the youngest team to make a Super Bowl in the previous four years (26.6) based on snap-weighted age, but they were still older than the league average (26.5). Football Outsiders has this age data for Super Bowl participants stretching back to 2006. Notably, the 2018 Patriots are the oldest team to win the Lombardi Trophy. The data is not exactly definitive. It is a small sample size, and half of last year’s playoff teams were ranked in the younger half of the league, so don’t try to sign present-day Joe Montana or Dan Marino to boost your Super Bowl chances. But this information helps us understand how smart teams are viewing roster-building.
The salary cap rises at least $10 million a year—and has increased a total of $65 million since 2013—and teams can roll over cap space, meaning they have more money than ever to spend. This led to some ludicrous situations, notably the Jets and Colts entering this offseason with over $100 million in cap space. It’s easier than ever for teams to add a midlevel veteran at a salary of say, $3 million, to a young roster. In short, teams can afford veterans, and in most cases, they are pretty good players. (Two GMs told me similar stories about a player on their team who finished his rookie contract. They both assumed their player would get a competing offer they couldn’t afford. They were wrong. After a soft market developed and no competition materialized, they were able to reopen negotiations, proving that a lot of non-star veterans are plenty affordable.)
Over the past decade or so, the NFL has developed into a league of haves and have-nots. If you got paid big money in the NFL in the 2010s, it usually meant you were a quarterback. More recently, non-passers have closed the gap: Los Angeles defensive lineman Aaron Donald, Bears defensive end Khalil Mack, Chiefs pass rusher Frank Clark, and Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner each received deals worth at least $18 million annually in recent years. But there is a massive gap between stars and scrubs, and midtier veterans can fill those gaps. General managers have taken notice of this inefficiency.
“What happened, obviously, is because of the salary structure being so out of whack, you can’t afford to have a whole crew of veterans. You have to have choice veterans at choice positions, which we’ve been able to do,” Panthers coach Ron Rivera told me.
Because of the salary cap and the rookie wage scale, teams will always have a large portion of players on their roster who are still on their rookie deal. According to a study from Over the Cap, a whopping 62 percent of NFL players were on their rookie deals last season. The study also found that the average cost of a player on his first contract was $1.06 million, compared with $5.85 million for players beyond their first contract, which means a veteran team will always be a relative term. Even the Patriots’ relatively ancient roster (made older by Tom Brady) had an average age of 27.9 years, oldest in the league.
You have to have choice veterans at choice positions, which we’ve been able to do.Panthers coach Ron Rivera
The 2013 Seahawks are the model for a team looking to draft, develop, and win immediately. It’s worth noting that this plan includes drafting multiple potential Hall of Famers like Wagner, Russell Wilson, and Richard Sherman in the middle rounds and superstars like Earl Thomas in the first. If a team is not confident it can execute a similar plan, it might consider building its roster with midtier veterans. However, there have been teams that have taken the draft-and-hold approach to extremes. I wrote a story during the 2016 playoffs about the Packers, who at the time had two players on their roster whom they didn’t draft.
I asked Titans general manager Jon Robinson about his team-building philosophy, specifically adding a handful of manageable second-contract players over the past few years. “This offseason, we tried to identify players who (a) have the skill set to help us and (b) understand that the skill set may not be to run by somebody or run over somebody because there are several different ways to win the rep,” Robinson told me. “[Cameron] Wake has rushed the passer a long time in this league and is pretty dang good at it. He doesn’t just win with speed or power. He’s learned how to analyze the set the tackle is giving him and works to get into position to win the rep. That knowledge and instinct is powerful. Logan Ryan is another one with defensive backs, Kenny Vaccaro, Ben Jones on the offensive line, Dion Lewis at running back, Adam Humphries is doing it at receiver. These guys are helping younger guys on their craft. There is a saying that the most powerful thing in the body is from the neck up, I think having that instinct and knowledge on how to win is just as important as the physical ability to win.”
As Robinson and I were talking, I brought up the Patriots—where he formerly worked as a director of college scouting—because a lot of people around the league mention the Patriots when it comes to using veterans effectively. They have helped their dynasty along by taking players from other teams, putting them in specific roles, and winning the Super Bowl with them. They use the rookie wage cap effectively—a star defensive end like Trey Flowers was a nice cap hit in 2018 at $2 million—but they also corner the market on midlevel veterans like Kyle Van Noy, Patrick Chung, Julian Edelman, and even Stephon Gilmore, all of whom made less than $10 million against the cap last season while on their second contracts.
“Every year, with the success the Patriots have had, you look at their roster, and they have a layer of veteran players,” Bills coach Sean McDermott said. “I think when you go back to the teams I’ve been around—Philadelphia or Carolina—there were a lot of veteran players in that mix. There is no substitute for experience. You don’t want to beat yourself, and sometimes younger players bring mistakes. You have to have both because of the challenge of balancing the cap. That’s a delicate balance.” The Bills signed 36-year-old running back Frank Gore this year as well as a slew of free agents to their second contracts—including Mitch Morse, Cole Beasley, and John Brown—to surround second-year quarterback Josh Allen.
“You can’t get out of balance,” Falcons coach Dan Quinn tells me. “If you get too much of the older, you don’t have enough speed and juice. But you can’t get too much of the young. That’s the balance.”
Rivera tells me he likes to have what he calls “a guy” on the team. This is a simple, but crucial role: “It’s a guy who comes to me and says, ‘Hey Coach, this isn’t right,’ or ‘Think about this,’ or if it’s really bad, ‘Hey Coach, this is fucked.’ What you need is a guy to tell you what you need to hear and not what you want to hear.” Rivera lists off the veteran players who have filled this role with the Panthers: Jordan Gross, DeAngelo Williams, Ryan Kalil, Thomas Davis. Now, he said, it’s Greg Olsen.
Rivera is concerned by the leaguewide disappearance of veterans, which is in part why he wants them in the locker room. “If we are not careful, we’re going to lose the sense of tradition of what this league is about,” Rivera said. “I don’t want to be that coach—sometimes I am that coach, saying ‘Well when I played …’ But when it comes from a current player, it carries a lot of weight. Greg Olsen says something and guys [nod their head]; Trai Turner has become that on the offensive line. We’ve got Torrey Smith, Chris Hogan, players who tell young guys what it’s about.”
Rivera thinks, in particular, that younger players are not as well-versed on earlier labor struggles, especially the fight to get the 1993 CBA done. “I was just talking to someone about how with the Bears, Mr. [George] Halas used to get offseason jobs for guys at banks or car dealerships,” he tells me. “There’s almost a sense of entitlement to these young guys. ... You aren’t entitled just because you showed up. You’re entitled because there’s a whole group that came before you and a group that came before them.”
So Rivera thinks veterans are important not just on the field and in the locker room but also to help teach the league’s history to players.
There are, of course, different types of veteran teams. While the Patriots are a hodgepodge of former free agents assembled to plug holes on a roster defined by the best quarterback in the league’s history, the Vikings, the 12th-oldest team in the league last year, have taken a different approach. Much of their roster is composed of players they’ve drafted and developed. “We were in a cycle where we were very young, but we had to pay all these guys,” general manager Rick Spielman told me, referring to a group of homegrown players that includes Harrison Smith, Kyle Rudolph, Adam Thielen, and, most recently, Anthony Barr, who rejoined the team on a five-year deal this year.
If you get too much of the older, you don’t have enough speed and juice. But you can’t get too much of the young. That’s the balance.Falcons coach Dan Quinn
“Our philosophy is: Hopefully we’re drafting well enough to give these guys second, big contracts. And I think now a lot of these guys are in their prime. So, you give these young guys roles where they don’t have to be starters right off the bat, though [first-round pick Garrett] Bradbury is the exception to the rule because we focused on the offensive line,” Spielman said. “But to draft [2019 rookie tight end] Irv Smith Jr. and extend [Kyle Rudolph], to bring Anthony Barr back, keeping that continuity with those guys—I think that’s why we’re pretty consistent on the defensive side. And hopefully, now with things settling down on the offensive side—systems in place and knowing what our identity is—that will carry over to the offensive side.” The point about continuity is crucial. Spielman, offensive coordinator Kevin Stefanski, and defensive coordinator George Edwards each talked about how important it is in a league with near-constant roster churn, and that keeping the core of a roster together, while hard, is worth it.
When you ask around the league about other benefits of going older, there are varied answers. A young, cheap player who still runs a 4.3-second 40-yard dash is probably the best building block to stopping the NFL’s ever-improving offenses, but there are more ways to slow those units. I asked 35-year-old New York Giants safety Antoine Bethea, a three-time Pro Bowler, about experiencing the NFL’s offensive boom throughout his career. He started his career in 2006, a year before the Patriots shattered offensive records, and has witnessed firsthand nearly every offensive trend over the past 13 years. But what I’m interested in is how veterans might be better equipped to fight back against modern NFL offenses, particularly the play-action-heavy offenses that are now en vogue across the league. “Veteran guys, older guys might get slower in their steps, but the one thing about them is they have great eyes and great technique. The veteran will be faster because he knows what he’s looking at,” said Bethea. “Obviously you have the politics of football, the business of football, but guys who have seen different things are going to be successful. That stuff is priceless.”
Giants defensive coordinator James Bettcher tells me that training a player’s eyes is perhaps the most important thing when defending against innovative offenses—not just on play-action, but with nearly any deceptive wrinkle that a modern offense can throw at a defense. “All that stuff: Play-action, naked bootleg, it’s all eyes,” he said. “I think you can train eyes. Some guys have dirty eyes and can see ghosts, but you can train them.”
There is no right answer when it comes to player age. Even if you wanted a roster of 53 players who were all 26, you couldn’t get them, so it will always be a blend, with young players remaining the most valuable resource in the league. Like most things in the NFL, the sample sizes are small, and the problems—or benefits—are mostly anecdotal. The league will probably get younger again this year; it always does now. And the Patriots will find some 30-year-old to get them to a Super Bowl, which also happens annually.