Five of the six lightest-spending teams made the playoffs last year, and two of the three lightest spenders played in the Super Bowl. Ten of the 12 playoffs teams from last year are in the bottom 14 in spending thus far. And two of the four in that cluster that didn’t make the playoffs (Atlanta, Carolina) have been in the Super Bowl and made the playoffs multiple times over the last four years.
• That leaves two of the 18 heaviest spenders that made the playoffs. One was eighth (Philly), the other was 12th (Baltimore).
• It’s not unusual that it’d skew this way—good teams don’t spend because they’ve already paid a lot of their own guys and likely don’t feel as desperate. But a quick look at the recent past shows that this year the divide between the habits of the haves and have-nots was much more pronounced.
So how do you explain it? Well, that part’s simple too.
“It’s just a bad class,” said one NFC exec. “This class was always ‘buyer beware.’ Even the guys who got franchised, not that they’re one-year wonders, but players like Frank Clark, Dee Ford—it’s more just that you wouldn’t be sure if you would want to go invest significantly in them.”
And maybe that’s why Bill Belichick was in Barbados while the rest of us were getting all hysterical back here.
https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/03/18/fr..._medium=social