I am never a person who comments on online articles, but I felt very strongly about what you wrote and love The Ringer. Your piece briefly mentions the differing realities between the NFL and NBA. However, for some reason, you seem to ignore the practical impact of those differences. There are 3 that I would point out:
- When an NFL franchise must pay 53 players on a $144 million salary cap (2015’s number), each team gets $2.72 million per player. To compare, in the NBA, the 2015–2016 season has a cap of $70M for a 15 man roster, which is $4.6M per player, and a luxury tax line of $84M, or $5.6M per player. In short, an NBA team can spend nearly 2x as much per player as an NFL team.
- The NFL’s outsized violence, which you briefly touched upon, makes it that much more likely for a star, highly paid player to get injured. In 2015 alone, Peyton Manning, Andrew Luck, Tony Romo, Joe Flacco, Drew Brees, Big Ben, Jay Cutler, and more all missed games with injury. The risk of injury is too great to invest all of your cap space in a handful of elite stars.
- The NFL is a significantly different game than the NBA. In the NBA, 1 star player can take over a game for significant periods of time and, with only 10 guys on the floor, have a major impact on that team’s odds at winning a title. In the NFL, there are 22 guys on the field on every snap. A weakness at any one of those positions can be fatal. Sure, an elite QB or DE can wreak havoc, but guys like Trent Dilfer, Brad Johnson, and even 2015 Peyton Manning showed you do not need an elite QB to win a championship. The 2008 Patriots won 11 games with Matt Cassell at QB! Similarly, JJ Watt is an athletic freak, but Houston has not won anything of note with him in their line up. The NFL is not just about stars, it is about having talent at all 11 positions on either side of the ball, the right system for your talent, and hiring coaches who can make adjustments in your system to win a game.
In sum, it’s nice to see our favorite football players get paid. But, at the end of the day, the NFL is the consummate team game. The large roster size (which, if anything, should be expanded to 56 or even 60 players), violent nature of the game, and the dependence on skill all around the field and system to win mean that you cannot buy your way to a Lombardi Trophy by paying a handful of stars to get you there. It also means that teams would be imprudent to spend significant cap space on 1 or 2 players, just because they play the most critical positions.