Warren Sharp Explains the Exploding Patriot Salary Cap Bomb Left by Ziegler/McDaniels

This is inevitable when you choose to rebuild quickly thru FA.
 
Last year later on in the season and in the playoffs I remember JC Jackson getting burned a few times. After seeing that, I wasn't as mad that he left. I still think that he's very good, but, not for that amount...
Every corner gets burned from time to time. His contract was not bad at all IMO.
 
Starting linebacker Kyle Van Noy is now with the Chargers. He played 75% of snaps and graded out as best in coverage last season, per PFF, among 90 qualified linebackers. These are the losses, two quality offensive lineman and two top-5 coverage players on the Patriots defense.
Van Noy is a loss? Even Gumby would be jealous of that stretch.

All blame goes on BB, he hired them, he has final say and he is capable of basic math. That's the price you pay for being in his position.
 
Van Noy is a loss? Even Gumby would be jealous of that stretch.

All blame goes on BB, he hired them, he has final say and he is capable of basic math. That's the price you pay for being in his position.

BB has the best record of winning rings than anyone in history. But he delegates a ton. This is obvious. And he has his ups and downs too. His best personnel periods were 2001-2004 and 2009-2012, coinciding with when quality personnel men were on his staff. I think the current front office is recently good again with Wolf/Groh, but it’s overly simplistic to automatically have this mindset that anything the team or BB does is gold, and any dissent is wrong. To overpay over 20MM for receivers and tight ends compared to the next highest team, is worth calling out.
 
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BB/Pats paid Jackson $5M for 4 years.
Chargers are paying $82.5M for 5 years.

Same player. This makes BB look like a genius in my eyes.

Warren Sharp is gambling advisor with a pretty good knack for picking winners. He made a ton of money by picking the Pats for 20 years. But he's another one of those guys who have an axe to grind against the Pats and BB because he believes, like some here, that Brady was responsible for the Pats' success. Sharp was once a great supporter of the Patriots and BB often using them as examples of the NFL doing the right things and doing those things the right way. He's done a 180 recently & he's making himself look like an idiot when it comes to BB and the Pats by contradicting good things he said over the last 20 years


1. Part of what makes BB better than any other coach is nobody is close to him at finding elite UDFA or low draft pick players, at the frequency that he does. It makes up for all the crappy 2nd round CB/WR busts.

2. Warren Sharp is being objective. He doesn’t have an axe to grind. The team hasn’t been the same since Halloween of 2018. Team nose dived the last 2 months when Brady checked out. It’s year 4 of the “rebuild”. Team faltered going 1-3 each of the last two years to end the season; very un-Patriotlike. Last year they only beat 2 winning teams and 1 was when that team had major injuries.

Having said all that, I think the team is on an upward trajectory having gotten some John Carroll rot finally out of Foxboro. The future is still bright. This season might be very rough however. Could easily be 1-3 after the first 4 games of this schedule.
 
BB has the best record of winning rings than anyone in history. But he delegates a ton. This is obvious. And he has his ups and downs too. His best personnel periods were 2001-2004 and 2009-2012, coinciding with when quality personnel men were on his staff. I think the current front office is good again with Wolf/Groh, but it’s overly simplistic to automatically have this mindset that anything the team or BB does is gold. And to pay over 20MM for receivers and tight ends compared to the next team, is worth calling out.
Except that it's just part of spending to the cap to meet your team needs. There was a severe shortage of WR and TE talent. He went all-in to address it in a single year. That's all good stuff.

The bad parts are the original lack of talent that necessitated the spending spree, and the structure of the contracts that ended up dumping most of the big money years into a single year. This is the year that is most cap-locked, and with all the youth on the team it looks like the team is setting up to make sure they can extend all the key contributors heading into next year and have cap available to be opportunistic in FA.

You might notice, BTW, that Belichick tends to go FA shopping in bunches to take advantage of the compensatory pick system. You can get picks in bunches, but you can't go negative. So it pays to grab higher-end FAs in one year where possible. And given that there are extra mid-round picks at stake, it can be worth what would be considered overpaying if you look at the signing in a vacuum.
 
Except that it's just part of spending to the cap to meet your team needs. There was a severe shortage of WR and TE talent. He went all-in to address it in a single year. That's all good stuff.

The bad parts are the original lack of talent that necessitated the spending spree, and the structure of the contracts that ended up dumping most of the big money years into a single year. This is the year that is most cap-locked, and with all the youth on the team it looks like the team is setting up to make sure they can extend all the key contributors heading into next year and have cap available to be opportunistic in FA.

You might notice, BTW, that Belichick tends to go FA shopping in bunches to take advantage of the compensatory pick system. You can get picks in bunches, but you can't go negative. So it pays to grab higher-end FAs in one year where possible. And given that there are extra mid-round picks at stake, it can be worth what would be considered overpaying if you look at the signing in a vacuum.

Excellent points. Although to your last paragraph, the Pats’ unprecedented spending spree was also coincidentally 2 months after the Bucs won a Superbowl
 
1. Part of what makes BB better than any other coach is nobody is close to him at finding elite UDFA or low draft pick players, at the frequency that he does. It makes up for all the crappy 2nd round CB/WR busts.

2. Warren Sharp is being objective. He doesn’t have an axe to grind. The team hasn’t been the same since Halloween of 2018. Team nose dived the last 2 months when Brady checked out. It’s year 4 of the “rebuild”. Team faltered going 1-3 each of the last two years to end the season; very un-Patriotlike. Last year they only beat 2 winning teams and 1 was when that team had major injuries.

Having said all that, I think the team is on an upward trajectory having gotten some John Carroll rot finally out of Foxboro. The future is still bright. This season might be very rough however. Could easily be 1-3 after the first 4 games of this schedule.

I have followed his work for 10 years. I have every preview book he's written from 2012-2019. He's a smart cookie but his articles turned against the Patriots when Brady left. He's definitely been grinding against BB with a slanted, glass half full view point since 2020.
 
I have followed his work for 10 years. I have every preview book he's written from 2012-2019. He's a smart cookie but his articles turned against the Patriots when Brady left. He's definitely been grinding against BB with a slanted, glass half full view point since 2020.

I hear you. Is it possible though that the win/loss record against good teams has also not been good since 2019
 
I'm an analytics guy and so is Sharp which got me interested in him.
BTW, Warren Sharp is a pseudonym. Here's an article about him in The New Yorker.
He claims the NFL uses his data but I doubt that very much.

 
I hear he posts the perfect Julian Calendar every Jan. 1, and the league follows it verbatim. 🤷
 
It was a 1 year concentrated hit timed to happen when they are paying their QB squat. Next year they have 41 guys signed with $55MM space to spare and the ability to gain at least $20-25MM more by painlessly extending Henry, Brown, Wise, Bourne, Mills, Andrews, and Parker...and that's assuming we want to keep all of those guys. They cost a total of about $55MM combined, but only about $15MM dead cap. If McCourty wants to keep playing we can extend him for another several MM, since 2023 is his void year.

The Patriots are in pretty good cap shape, in spite of a few bad contracts. I'd say only Smith and Agholor are really problematic, and mostly Smith. The cap is over $200MM, so the average player's cap hit is a little under $4MM. Judon is well worth 4x that amount. Henry is close. Bourne at 1.5x the average salary? Hardly a crippler. Mills at 1.5x? Bargain.

That's an excellent post. Noted for future reference.
 
I'm an analytics guy and so is Sharp which got me interested in him.
BTW, Warren Sharp is a pseudonym. Here's an article about him in The New Yorker.
He claims the NFL uses his data but I doubt that very much.


Seems like he’s widely read. I get the sentiment to attack anyone who doesn’t drink Foxboro kool-aid, but it seems like a lot of people in the football industry read Warren Sharp’s content
 
Again, did you even tell Bill this???

Cheers

I know you were talking to the other guy, but I will say 71-yr-old BB seems even more hands off than usual. A bit concerning when the media asks him for specific takes on OLine players and he seems to honestly think it’s fine (not just the typical media-answer stonewalling)
 
I know you were talking to the other guy, but I will say 71-yr-old BB seems even more hands off than usual. A bit concerning when the media asks him for specific takes on OLine players and he seems to honestly think it’s fine (not just the typical media-answer stonewalling)

Other than the constant desire to be negative, what do you have to show that this is even slightly true?

Show your work.
 
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