The Ball Starts Rolling

Trying to get a sense of the mood out there right now... 

Is it just me, or is everyone else starting to get excited, too?  I realize it's July, but this feels like the start of football season to me. 

I'm pretty pumped.

Although not everyone is.  Boy, it really must suck to have to go to training camp every year and walk around with that special media access badge and interview all those coaches and players the rest of us only get to see on autograph days. 

They should just do the whole thing in Philadelphia, because the Northeast Extension is just sooooo loooooong.  And have you seen what there is to do in Bethlehem? 

Anywho, grinches be darned because, ladies and gentlemen, it's FOOTBALL SEASON.

Ish.

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As the Brian Westbrook salary saga continues to lurch forward in fits and starts (and could the local commentariat be any more obvious about how hard they're rooting for some training camp drama this year?) I thought you all might be interested in a few charts I worked up looking at price vs. performance for last year's offense.  Here's the raw data:

 

For the salary column, I took the information from EaglesCap.com and computed an average salary over the course of a full contract.  I realize that's only one of about 20 ways one could go about doing that, but it seemed like a pretty fair approach for this kind of back-of-the-envelope sort of thing.  And no, I didn't give Mahe his $4 million pseudo bonus that was just a salary cap shift.

Here's the same information organized a little differently to show touches, yards and touchdowns per dollar spent on each player:

And in graph form (click for full size):

I didn't mess with the y-axis scales to prove a point, that's just how excel spit it out.  And there's nothing really definitive about this.  Around the league, I would bet starting wide receivers have much higher prices per yards than running backs, for a variety of reasons. 

But if you look at the chart -- and take out Mahe (return man mostly) and Hunt (never played) -- there's sort of a nice relationship there between dollars spent and yards produced.  Schobel is the clear underachiever in that group -- you can kind of see L.J.'s point, by the way -- but the two starting wide receivers also seem a little off, if only by the eyeball test.

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In other news, good article today on why Westbrook's age, not his production, is the real issue.  As that bountybowl guy has mentioned several times, you just know Joe Banner has a printout in the top drawer of his desk showing the rapidly declining performance of running backs past a certain age.

I'm big-time in the "pay the man his money" camp, but if Westbrook really is looking for something like $30 million guaranteed, then I can see why an agreement hasn't exactly been easy to reach.

Interesting in this case, though, that this is one of the rare times that this information came from the player, and not some anonymous source.  The general source for that sort of thing is usually a little closer to the NovaCare complex.

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Finally, this just goes to show that Dan Snyder hasn't learned a thing.  All offseason people have been talking about how Snyder had changed his business model and was committed to building long-term depth rather than just signing the latest quick fix. 

Oops.  Not so much.

The best part about this, if you're an Eagles fan, is that it's almost no net gain for the Redskins.  No, I'm not saying I'm rooting for guys to get hurt.  But since the Daniels injury happened, basically Washington went out and gave away second and sixth round picks for a guy who's a better player, but not that much better. 

If he's going to be in the division, that's the best place for him to be.