Asking the key value of things question.
In many ways, I am a baseball guy writing about football. I essentially took a lot of the methods and ideas that I have had over the years about baseball analysis and applied it to football. Yet, when we look at cap management, it is a purer form of this question than the NBA or MLB could ever muster. In the NFL there is literally a finite amount of money that you could spend and every team has the same amount.
The team that spends it the most efficiently is almost always playing late in January if not early February. So, it is in this vain that we ask this question in our continuing series. With new Houston Texans RB Joe Mixon and WR Stefon Diggs, we were able to compare them with similar players that might produce a similar amount.
Clearly, you can see we are talking about Dalton Schultz. There were no comparable tight ends on the open market. So, there really is no sense in finding a guy to compare him to. Instead we dive into the original concept behind the value of things. The upshot is that I get to illustrate the whole concept behind the column in the first place with a little thought experiment.
We should start with the contract itself. Dalton Schultz signed a three-year, $36 million contract shortly before free agency began. In fairness, we didn’t necessarily know what would happen after that signing, but it should be interesting that the team has two tight ends that could end up being decent receiving tight ends in addition to Schultz.
Coming into training camp, Schultz is officially the tenth highest paid tight end in the league. That includes Darren Waller who has announced his retirement. So, depending on how you want to treat Waller, that could bump Schultz up to ninth. Thus, we get two separate questions: is he the ninth best tight end in football and was there a better way to spend that money.
The first question is a fairly easy one, but as we discussed with Nico Collins earlier, the question is a specious one due to how the NFL does contracts. Whoever signs the latest is always the top guy whether they really are or not. Trevor Lawrence just signed an extension making him the highest paid quarterback in football. Is he the best quarterback in football? Of course not. He is just the one that signed most recently.
In 2023, Schultz was tied for 12th in receptions amongst tight ends, was 12th in receiving yards, and tied for seventh with five touchdowns. I suppose an argument could made that he is a top-ten tight end based on these numbers, but any discussion would also have to include blocking ability. That is something that complicates his argument because blocking is not one of his strong suits. He was 11th in receiving yards per game, so I suppose calling him a top ten tight end is not completely out of the question.
This is where we get to the second question: could that money have been spent elsewhere to better effect? To answer that question we would need to get a handle on what Brevin Jordan and Cade Stover could do in his place. That’s obviously a theoretical question, but that is essentially the exact question that brings value into the forefront.
In the statistics world, value can be defined as the distance between a particular player or event and an established frame of reference. In plain English, that means we could compare a particular player with the average or with the replacement level and that gap would be that player’s value.
It always bugged me when a baseball fan would lament losing a particular player and say “we just lost 100 RBI.” No you didn’t. Someone is going to man the spot that player vacated. You lost the difference between what Player A did produce and what Player B will produce. Letting Schultz go wouldn’t drop you to zero at the tight end position. It drops you to the difference between what Schultz would have produced and what Jordan/Stover would have produced.
There is a gap there, but that gap isn’t 59 catches. Furthermore, we then would have to ask the question of how that 12 million could be spent that might make another position group better. What happens if you invested it in a safety to play alongside Jalen Pitre? What happens if you invested it in another good defensive tackle to make the front four even more formidable?
At the end of the day, this isn’t a huge deal. There is a gap between Schultz and Jordan and Stover probably isn’t ready to be a primary tight end either. However, as we sit here in June we can ask these kinds of questions as a way to determine if the football team is maximizing all of its resources to the best of their ability.