Are The Eagles Cheap?

Last week, in the comments section, ray asked a good question:

Westbrook says the [E]agles are cheap and uncommitted to winning by signing players who will take lesser contracts as opposed to better players for more.  That was true for [Norman B]raman who let star players walk who were still in their prime but if I'm correct this [E]agles organization seems to be up around the cap and it usually happens during the year when they have extra money to extend their core players during the year. Is that right or do you think they are cheap too?

And of course, the reactionary columnists have happily jumped that theme, and taken Brian Westbrook’s comments as an indictment of the front office.

I find the whole question to be difficult to answer.  If this were a debate, I would be able to argue strongly for whichever side I was given, because there is lots of misleading data out there on both sides. Figuring out what I believe to be the truth is much harder.

Let’s describe what the Eagles actually do before evaluating whether they are being cheap or not.

There are three key elements that I want to discuss.

1. The Eagles believe in extending players early, and locking them up for the peak years of their career. Once they identify a player as being likely to be high-quality, they work to make sure that he remains an Eagle for his most productive years.
2. The Eagles believe that older players are generally bad investments. They typically don’t invest in those players, especially long-term, regardless of whether they are free agents from another team or whether they are leaders from their own team. (Note that they historically don’t cut expensive but productive veterans to save cash, they just don’t re-sign them to deals that extend past what the team thinks will be the player's productive years. Those are two different concepts.)
3. The Eagles prefer quality depth to premier talent. Understand, they definitely acquire premier talent when they can, but the goal is to get as many good players as possible on the roster as they can, even if it potentially means that they have less "great" players. I believe that this is a big reason why they are generally so successful in the second half of the season: when injuries hit the league, the Eagles have the roster depth to handle those injures in a way that other teams just cannot.

There are other things that the Eagles do, for sure, but those are the three that I think most often feed the debate about whether the team is cheap or not.  And they also feed the associated debate about whether the front office is committed to winning or not. These are related arguments, though not identical.

The common theme behind all three of their behaviors is the desire to get the most overall quality out of the roster as they can.  They want players who are peaking or improving, not players who are declining.  They want 53 guys who can contribute at a high level, not 22. To do that, yes, they need a combination of guys who are paid less than their value to the team, and guys who are paid exactly their value to the team. And they try to avoid being in a situation where they pay a guy more than his value to the team, because doing so prevents them from spending that money on players who will contribute more.

There is also good reason to believe that the Eagles spend at a level that is consistent with the rest of the teams in the league. However, I haven’t seen solid stats on that. We used to be able to pull those numbers out of the USA Today salary database, but that database got screwed up a few years ago, and has never been the same. The Eaglescap blog has tried to figure out cash spending by the Eagles over the past four years, and they have spent a great deal of real money. But I have no sense of what the league-wide average is.

The question of whether the Eagles are committed to winning is related, but as I said, it is different. Cheapness can be measured over time; but by commitment to winning, people are talking about “any given year.” The Eagles’ goal is to be a playoff team every year. That is different than a team whose goal is to be a Super Bowl team in one given year, who spends at an unsustainable level to try to make that run, then collapses for a period of time.  The philosophy I outlined above is very consistent with the playoff team every year idea. They want consistent quality. Not peaking quality.

What isn’t clear to me is whether the likelihood of winning a Super Bowl depends on lumpy spending, or whether a consistent approach is the best way to go. The Patriots, the Colts and the Steelers, probably the gold standards of the last decade, are all proponents of the consistent approach. The Colts especially and the Steelers to a lesser extent are generally not big players in the free agent market, while the Patriots tend to play in the aging veteran end of the free agent pool.

What I can never reconcile is where commitment to winning ends and luck begins. Getting to 5 NFCCGs in the past 10 years shows a consistently strong roster; does losing 4 of those games show a lack of commitment, or bad luck? And if it is the former, how do we know that it is the front office’s fault? How do we know it isn’t the players who weren’t sufficiently committed to winning that last game? And don’t get us started on the coaching staff.

Billy Beane famously opined that his job was to get the team into the playoffs, and whatever happened after that was just luck. Billy Beane has never won a World Series.  Adam Oates once said before the NHL trading deadline that his Bruins needed to upgrade their talent level; his coach made him stand up in the locker room and point to the players who he thought weren’t worthy of playing with him (he refused). The team then traded Oates to Washington.

The point is that front offices never think that the last hurdle is their fault; the players will never honestly dole out responsibility to other players either. The only person who takes responsibility is the head coach, and nobody believes him.  And the truth is likely that everyone is to blame in a little piece, and that if any one of those faulty parties had done their job a little bit better, the history of this franchise would be quite different.

So to the extent that “lack of commitment” and not luck is the reason that the Eagles still haven’t won a Super Bowl, I do think the front office philosophy is partially to blame. In any given year, they could have done more, though probably not every year. But I don’t think it is THE reason. I think there is enough blame for everyone.

-----

The irony of how this discussion got started is that, of all people, Brian Westbrook is the biggest counter-example to how the Eagles typically do business that has been in the organization during the Andy Reid era.  The Eagles made exceptions for him not once, but three times in his career:

• In 2005, the Eagles signed him to a contract extension after he held out of training camp briefly. He could do this because he was a restricted free agent, given a first round tender. The Eagles never reward holding out. And they rarely re-sign guys who make it to the last year before unrestricted free agency.
• In 2008, the Eagles renegotiated Westbrook’s contract, giving him a ton more money without adding any extra years to the deal. Subsequently, Donovan McNabb also got a pay raise without an extension, but Westbrook was the trend-setter here.
• In 2010, the Eagles will cut Westbrook with a year left on his deal – and he can still play. Again, that is fairly rare. Sure, there have been exceptions, like Takeo Spikes, but generally, the Eagles let their good players’ contracts expire, then don’t re-sign them. They don’t cut productive players. They wait until a guy like Jevon Kearse or Nate Wayne or Dhani Jones appears to be incapable of playing for the team anymore, then cut him. (Or in the case of Darwin Walker, Hollis Thomas, Mark Simoneau, et al., they trade him.) Of course, Westbrook probably can no longer start for a team. But he was certainly capable of continuing to be a major contributor to the Eagles.

That isn’t to say he has no right to make the comments he makes. But if you want an example of the Eagles committing to their own players – he is the exception you point to.