Super Bowls are built on star power, but amassing talent in the NFL is a chess match between 32 teams thanks to the league’s hard salary cap.
Throwing 20 percent or more of a team’s spending room may be necessary to keep a great quarterback, but it’ll mean spending less on productive veterans who can help the roster elsewhere.
While low-cost free agent help can occasionally produce high level results, the most reliable way to add starting contributors at a fraction of their actual worth is through the NFL Draft. Rookie scale contracts mean teams get four years of cost-controlled, inexpensive play as young prospects develop into stars, starters or something less. Finding a stud at these low payouts means an opportunity to invest money elsewhere each offseason.
But who is creating the most value for their rosters this fall?
Excess value is a relatively easy concept to apply. You take a current player’s salary and compare it to what you’d expect to pay him on the open market based on current contract values. So if you have a top two wide receiver (estimated value: $30 million annually) and he’s only making an average of $2 million per season, your excess value would be $28 million. That’s the money general managers can conceptually splash around on free agents since they don’t have to pay market price for the elite production they already have.
The original plan was to sort this list by salary cap hits, but that isn’t entirely fair thanks to the accounting gymnastics endemic to NFL front offices. Christian McCaffrey, for example, will only cost $3.4 million against the San Francisco 49ers’ cap this fall but it’d be difficult to call him a bargain on a four-year, $64 million contract. So instead we’ll balance expected value vs. annual average salary for each player’s current contract.
There are several veterans who are bargains. Austin Ekeler, for example, is the league’s best receiver out of the backfield but has been getting paid well below his actual favor on a contract that pays him just over $6 million annually. Chauncey Gardner-Johnson is worth more than the $6.25 million he’ll make with the Detroit Lions this fall. But even deals like that can’t really keep up with the relative dirt cheap costs of rookie contracts, particularly for players drafted outside the first round.
These bargains are weighted against actual NFL salaries, not potential worth. So Patrick Mahomes might be a bargain at $500 million over the course of a decade, but right now he’s simply a properly paid quarterback in the upper echelon of his cohort.
Players’ labels are based on their play in the most recent season and don’t account for any potential growth in 2023 or beyond. That means someone like Garrett Wilson, already a bargain based on his rookie year production, could rocket up these rankings in year two — especially with Aaron Rodgers slinging passes his way.
As you’d expect, players who play positions of high value make up the bulk of this list, including an all-quarterback top four. So where should general managers focus on finding rookie contract talent at the NFL Draft in order to create the savings that could spur a Super Bowl run?
Here are the players whose average salaries generated the biggest bargains for 2023: