The Best Team Money Can Buy

If you’re a regular at Over the Cap or Spotrac, then this one is for you.

While every season brings with it its own sense of contract drama, the volume this year has been louder than usual. Running back value, in particular, has been a headline-driving force. Holdouts by Josh Jacobs and Saquon Barkley, as well as grumblings by Austin Ekeler and Jonathan Taylor, sparked conversations on how to fairly compensate superstars at a position with a very short shelf life, with top backs holding their own summit to try to come with a solution to the problem; a solution that really can’t be implemented until a new CBA is signed after 2030. And that’s not even getting into holdouts by Zack Martin, Chris Jones, Nick Bosa and a passel of other superstars during training camp; some of which are still ongoing two with just two weeks before the season begins. At times, this has been an offseason where we’ve talked more about APY than YPC; more about void years than DVOA ranks.

The fundamental problem is that NFL contracts are a zero-sum game. With a hard salary cap, every dollar you pay a player is a dollar you can’t pay someone else, and all the cap manipulation in the world doesn’t change the fact that you’re working with a limited number of resources. And the analytics movement has played a major role in shifting where NFL teams put their money. Running back salaries have dropped dramatically (as a percentage of cap) as more and more research shows that not only is the passing game far more efficient than the running game, but that the offensive line has more of an impact on rushing success than they have historically been given credit for – and that you can get 80% of the production of top backs for 20% of the cost. Instead, teams are paying their offensive line. They’re paying their wide receivers so they can flood the field with more of them as 11 personnel has gone from a neat trick to the default offense over the past decade and change. And they’re paying quarterbacks roughly $Montana as even an above-average one can paper over so many other deficiencies. The same is true on the other side of the ball – interior line contracts have gone up and off-ball linebacker contracts have gone down as research continues to show the relative value of the respective positions. Teams are trying to find the ideal way to allocate their limited cap dollars to give them the best chance of winning a championship, and some positions are getting left in the lurch.

It’s a tough job, and one of the best ways to see how tough of a job it is is to try to do it yourself. This is something I have been doing off and on off for years, because it’s the sort of thing you do when you obsessively follow a sport and are, at heart, just an irredeemable nerd. So, let’s do it! Let’s build the best 53-man roster we can.

A couple ground rules before we start. This isn’t just a list of the most valuable contracts in the NFL; you don’t win extra games for having the most salary cap saved. The point of finding value in some positions is that it lets you splurge more elsewhere. There are players on this team who probably make “too much” money, whatever that means, but they’re also very, very good. We’re generating value so we can afford them!

Secondly, we’re trying to stay somewhat within the bounds of realism. Sometimes, you’ll find thought experiments like this that feature Joe Burrow, Justin Jefferson, CeeDee Lamb and Tristan Wirfs on the same roster, and conveniently forget to explain just how they managed to have four first-round picks in 2020. Or they load up the teams with players with small cap hits this year, ignoring the fact that their cap hits balloon the next season and leaves them $150 million over the cap. We can’t all be Mickey Loomis and dig our way out of a mess every season. We’re looking for a feasible version of the unfeasible team.

Our team is limited to one pick from each round of the 2020-2023 drafts as well as one first-rounder from 2019 thanks to the fifth-year extension and one undrafted player from each of the last four seasons. That gives us 33 players on comparatively cheap contracts; the remaining 20 slots can be any veteran we fancy. We are allowed to poach players who never hit free agency in real life, but we’re stopping ourselves from racking up tons of cheap deals on players who haven’t even had the theoretical opportunity to switch teams yet.

Our team manages to squeeze under both the 2023 and 2024 salary caps, with 39 of the 53 still on the books for next season as well. That’s not to say there would be no cap work to be done next offseason, but it’s mostly relatively painless decisions. And with so many superstars on one team, we’ll likely have the presence of a Lombardi Trophy to make everything that much easier to swallow.

Quarterbacks

The most valuable thing an NFL team can have is a good quarterback on a rookie contract. We’ll take three of ’em.

Picking the starter was a tough call. You could make arguments for Joe Burrow, for Justin Herbert, for Tua Tagovailoa. But our team starts with Jalen Hurts (2023 cap hit: $6.2 million) for multiple reasons. Already a rushing threat – and yes, our team will be using Philadelphia’s patented unstoppable quarterback fourth-down sneak, thank you – Hurts improved as a passer in essentially every metric and every split in 2022. His 10.6% passing DVOA was tenth in the league, and he jumped to third in EPA/play. He started throwing the ball while standing in the pocket and delivering over the middle of the field, areas he didn’t hit in 2021. In a world where Patrick Mahomes did not exist, he would have been a worthy MVP. He also costs less than any of the other options here, ranking 28th in quarterback hit in 2023, 19th in 2024, and 15th in 2025, and that’s after already signing an extension in April of this year. We’ll have more cap flexibility in the future than Herbert’s Chargers. And he doesn’t block the 2020 first-round pick slot, allowing it to work into our plans later.

Ideally, we’d love to put a couple of similar style quarterbacks behind Hurts, but those players don’t go on trees. Instead, we’ll take Brock Purdy ($0.9 million) as our backup. He’s shown he can be decently successful coming off the bench when need be; his 21.5% passing DVOA was the sixth highest ever for a rookie with at least 150 attempts. And we’ll throw in Aidan O’Connell ($0.9 million) as a third-string developmental player; the fourth-round pick from Purdue is 26-for-34 for 304 yards and three touchdowns in his first two preseason games and is looking at least like he can go into a game and not immediately implode in an emergency situation.

Total 2023 Cost: $7.9 million, or less than Zach Wilson.

Running Backs

What would it take to make paying a running back tons of money worth it in 2023? Well, you’d have to be someone like Christian McCaffrey ($3.4 million). McCaffrey has significant value as a receiver, as well as just a runner; his 218 receiving DYAR led all running backs. He has positional versatility as well. Many running backs earn their receiving numbers through screens and angle routes out of the backfield; McCaffrey lines up as a receiver about 18% of the time, sees more than a quarter of his targets split out wide or in the slot and can run a full route tree. McCaffrey also provided an immediate and tangible impact on San Francisco’s offense; they jumped from a -5.8% offensive DVOA before McCaffrey’s arrival to a 24.0% after he entered the starting lineup. His was a force multiplier in the offense; his versatility meant that defenses were nearly always in a matchup disadvantage no matter how they tried to account for CMC.

It also helps that the 49ers aren’t footing his entire bill. We probably should have started there.

McCaffrey’s four-year extension from 2020 gives him $16 million per year, which is probably too much even for a healthy CMC. But because he signed that deal with Carolina, his $21.5 million signing bonus remained on their books, not San Francisco’s. As a result, the 49ers get him for closer to $12 million a year for the next three seasons – still a lot, but much more palatable for a player they can design their offense around. He only will cost them $3.4 million this year, barely cracking the top 20 in running back cap hits. And he’s slated to make less than Nick Chubb, Aaron Jones or Alvin Kamara in 2024. 

McCaffrey does have an injury history, and so we’ll need the rest of our corps to be able to step in and share the load. Kenneth Walker ($1.9 million) is our home run hitter; his DVOA was low because he was inconsistent on a play-for-play basis, but he had a 7.5% explosive run rate in 2022, fourth among qualified running backs. Our go-to short yardage runner will likely be Hurts, but Jamaal Williams ($1.9 million) ranked fifth with 83 rushing DYAR with 1-3 yards to go and 51 rushing DYAR inside the 10, areas where neither McCaffrey nor Walker particularly shine. We’ll also add seventh-round pick DeWayne McBride ($0.8 million); the no-nonsense between-the-tackles rusher from UAB had the second-highest projection in BackCAST, the FTN Football Almanac‘s method of projecting rookie running back success.

Total 2023 Cost: $8.0 million, or less than James Conner.

Wide Receivers

The final thing that put Hurts over the top as our quarterback is that it allowed us to take Justin Jefferson ($4.2 million) with our first-round pick in 2020. Jefferson led the league with 489 receiving DYAR and joined Randy Moss and Michael Thomas as the only players to have at least 300 receiving DYAR in each of their first three seasons. He’s already arguably the best receiver in football, and he’s only 24.

We’ll splurge a little bit and grab Terry McLaurin ($11.0 million) to play alongside him; McLaurin’s 218 DYAR when split out wide led the league, and that was with catching passes from Carson Wentz and Taylor Heinicke. Amon-Ra St. Brown ($1.1 million) will slide in as our slot receiver, giving us three of the top 10 players in receiving DYAR and top 25 in receiving DVOA last season in our starting lineup. With McLaurin stretching the field deep on go routes; Jefferson destroying the middle of the field on dig routes, and St. Brown catching everything underneath, we’re attacking the defense on all three levels. Best of luck with that.

Behind them, we’ll add Gabe Davis ($2.9 million) for when you absolutely, positively must throw the ball 10,000 yards downfield; his 15.4-yard aDOT was second highest among qualified receivers and he finished 10th with 180 DYAR on passes at least 15 yards downfield. Adam Thielen ($3.3 million) may be slowly declining, but he is a steady veteran presence who has a 46.9% receiving DVOA in the red zone over the last three seasons; there will be solid situational uses for his 6-foot-2, 200-pound frame. We’ll also throw in sixth-round pick A.T. Perry ($0.8 million) from Wake Forest, an inconsistent but exciting prospect with an 82-inch wingspan.

Total 2023 Cost: $23.4 million, or less than Mike Evans.

Tight Ends

We’ll go with a pair of veterans when we want to fill out two-TE sets. Dallas Goedert ($6.3 million) has finished first and second in receiving DVOA among tight ends in the last two seasons; the Eagles had a 27.7% passing DVOA with him on the field and a 15.0% DVOA without him; he helped make their passing offense special. He’s not exactly world-renowned for his blocking abilities, however, so we’ll find plenty of use for Dalton Schultz ($2.8 million) as well. Schultz is reliable as a pass catcher and a solid hand as a blocker; he didn’t really find a market this year in free agency, so we’ll get the same deal on him the Texans did.

We still will need to find ways to get Chigoziem Okonkwo ($1.0 million) on the field; he had a 20.2% DVOA while also playing half of Tennessee’s snaps on special teams, something that we do have to keep in mind when assembling the roster. We’ll also take third-round pick Darnell Washington ($0.9 million); the Georgia tight end is a fantastic run blocker with plenty of untapped potential as a receiver.

Total 2023 Cost: $11.0 million, or less than Hunter Henry.

Offensive Line

We’ve saved enough money elsewhere that we can splurge on the offensive line; keeping Hurts upright and giving room for McCaffrey and Walker to run are high priorities and worth every penny that we’ve saved up so far. Tackle and guard contracts have outpaced the growth of the salary cap over the past 10 years because teams are acknowledging more and more just how much the big uglies up front dictate the success of an offense. We’ll be no exception.

We’ll just keep things simple for Hurts and import his bookend tackles from Philadelphia: Lane Johnson ($14.7 million) and Jordan Mailata ($7.5 million). Both have an argument as the best tackle in the league, and while I don’t think either quite get there, they don’t cost as much as Trent Williams does even when combined. Both are studs, albeit with different specialties – Johnson ranked first in ESPN’s pass block win rate, while Mailata was second in run block win rate.

The Cowboys’ standoff with Zack Martin ($11.8 million) ended the way it should, with the future Hall of Famer getting a little more money and a lot more guaranteed and putting him once more in line with the other top guards in the league, contract-wise. To offset paying Martin that much, we’ll go a little cheaper with our other two starters on the inside. Mike Onwenu ($3.0 million) has experience at both tackle and guard, while Creed Humphrey ($1.5 million) has already become a top center in just his third year as a pro.

We’re not exactly hurting for depth, either. Our tackles are Terence Steele ($4.3 million) and Josh Jones ($3.0 million); our backup guard is Trey Smith ($1.0 million) and our reserve center is David Andrews ($7.0 million). We’re not going to risk our fleet of superstars at the skill positions getting derailed by an offensive line injury; our second-team line would be one of the better units in the league.

Total 2023 Cost: $53.8 million, or less than the Cincinnati Bengals line.

Edge Rushers

Do you prefer Nick Bosa ($17.9 million) or Micah Parsons ($4.7 million)? Doesn’t matter; we have them both. For the record, I prefer Bosa as a pure pass rusher; he had 50 quarterback knockdowns last year when no one else even hit 40. Parsons’ versatility and ability to be moved around the defense, however, makes him the better overall defender to build a defense around. It’s a moot point on this team, though, as we’re taking two of the five players with 50 pressures last season, pointing them at the quarterback, and telling them to have fun.

For the record, this is being written before Bosa and the 49ers come to an agreement on a new contract; we left room on the 2024 cap to account for Bosa getting paid. 

When they need a breather, we have Za’Darius Smith ($3.0 million), who had 46 pass pressures of his own last season. A little deeper in the rotation, you’ll find Jonathon Cooper ($1.0 million); a steady rotational pass rusher for Denver who also is a regular contributor on special teams. We’ll also use our 2023 UDFA slot on Lonnie Phelps ($0.8 million). The Kansas linebacker was in high demand just after the draft; he’s aggressive and tough and explosive and athletic and, frankly, undersized for the NFL with some technique issues. He’ll be a special teams standout for us.

Total 2023 Cost: $27.3 million, or less than T.J. Watt.

Interior Linemen

The quickest way to the quarterback is a straight line. That’s why Aaron Donald makes a zillion dollars; it’s why the 49ers broke the bank to bring in Javon Hargrave; it’s why Chris Jones is holding out now. If you can find someone who can consistently and effectively bring pressure up the middle, it makes everything else on defense that much easier.

We can’t quite stretch to a Donald or a Jones, but we can make room for Cameron Heyward ($22.3 million), who finished with 37 quarterback pressures while also having the second-most run defeats among interior linemen – a player with no holes in his game. Offensive lines already taxed by our edge rushers won’t be able to stop Heyward up the middle.

We’re pairing him with our first-round pick in 2023, Georgia tackle Jalen Carter ($4.0 million). And, in case Carter doesn’t quite work out immediately, or needs time to acclimate himself to NFL game speed (though judging from preseason, he’s good to go), we’re also adding Calais Campbell ($7.5 million) on a one-year deal. Our two 30-something vets will help the uber-talented Carter get the most out of his talent right from the word go.

As part of the rotation, we’re including Michael Pierce ($3.2 million); even coming back from a torn biceps, he’s one of the better true nose tackle options out there and we do occasionally need to play the run. Osa Odighizuwa ($1.4 million) and Broderick Washington ($1.8 million) flesh out the back of the roation.

Total 2023 cost: $40.2 million, or less than the Atlanta Falcons’ line.

Linebackers

We’ll take a pair of old veterans in the middle of our defense – still about 85-90% of the players they were in their primes, but at a substantial discount compared to how much they’ve made in the past.

I cannot explain why Lavonte David ($1.8 million) is as cheap as he is. For years, we’ve sung his praises as the king of defeats, our stat that measures when a defender makes a big play. David has played in 11 NFL seasons. He has been in the top 20 10 times – he led all linebackers with 19 pass defeats last season, and is still a top-10 coverage linebacker. He’ll be joined by Bobby Wagner ($7.0 million), who had a slow start to 2022 but finished with 34 defeats of his own, mostly in run defense.

Backing them up with be Malcolm Rodriguez ($0.9 million), who started from day one as a rookie in Detroit, and Alabama fifth-round pick Henry To’oTo’o ($0.8 million), who might do the same thing in Houston. We’ll be set for when our 30-something linebackers age out.

Total 2023 Cost: $10.6 million, or less than Devin White.

Secondary

A pair of second-year players highlight our secondary. There was no way Sauce Gardner ($7.6 million) wasn’t making the team after his Defensive Rookie of the Year performance last season, and Riq Woolen ($1.0 million) would have been a strong contender for best rookie corner in most years. Woolen’s more of the ballhawk type, willing to gamble and winning more often than not last season, with six interceptions to his name. Gardner just is the most polished, complete corner we’ve seen enter the league in some time; arguably already the best cover corner in all of football and with the sky as the limit. Desmond King ($4.5 million) joins them to handle the slot; he’s turned into something of a ballhawk himself with five of his nine career interceptions coming since joining the Texans two years ago. We’ll also add in our second-round rookie, Penn State’s Joey Porter ($1.7 million) – he’s probably too stiff to play in the slot, as he’s a press-man specialist without great change-of-direction ability, but he’s got tons of potential. 

At safety, we’ll start with an All-Pro in Talanoa Hufanga ($1.0 million). Hufanga was a heat-seeking missile in his first season as a starter; tied for the lead in SIS’ Total Points metric and third in defeats among safeties with 55. Jordan Poyer ($4.9 million) has been the cornerstone of Buffalo’s defense for years and may well be the best cover safety in football; he’ll play free safety more for us and let Hufanga slip up in the box. Kamren Curl ($3.0 million) is our third safety; another run-thumper and one of the best tacklers in the league. His 3.4% broken tackle rate ranked third in 2022.

We also will use a couple slots here to bolster our special teams. Marcus Jones ($1.2 million) led all players in punt return value in 2022 and provided playmaking skills on defense and offense; he’s here more as a weapon than a cornerback. George Odum ($2.3 million) led all players with 20 special teams tackles; he’s our ace in the hole on our coverage units. 

Total 2023 Cost: $33.6 million, or less than the New York Giants’ secondary.

Special Teams

Don’t draft specialists.

Punter Ryan Stonehouse ($0.9 million) broke Sammy Baugh’s 80-year-old punting average record last season. He was undrafted out of Colorado State.

Long snapper Nick Moore ($1.2 million) was the second-team All-Pro long snapper. He was undrafted out of Georgia.

Kicker Riley Patterson ($0.9 million) is, uh, perfectly adequate. He was undrafted out of Memphis.

Total 2023 Cost: $3.0 million, or less than Dustin Hopkins.

Final Tally

Your final total for 2023 is a svelte $212,317,115, or a full $12.5 million under this year’s salary cap. That puts us in the middle of the pack in terms of cap space, with plenty of room to make moves if somehow we have depth problems in the middle of the year. As for 2024, we’re a little tighter at $247,515,441, but that’s still $8.5 million under the currently projected salary cap. That puts us in better shape than 10 teams for 2024, so that’s mission accomplished.

Having only 39 players under contract for 2023 is a little less than ideal, but it’s not insanely low in the grand scheme of things; both the Chiefs and Cardinals are currently sitting at 45, and that number will go down once they cut their rosters to 53. We also cut free up some cap space next season if needs be. Cutting Cameron Heyward would free up $16 million in cap space; David Andrews or Jordan Poyer would give us $5.5 million apiece. It may be a roster maxed out for 2023, but there are enough superstars left under contract for 2024 and beyond that this team would be competitive for a long, long time.

And hey, we even found the solution on how to afford to pay a running back – just have your scouting department never, ever miss a draft pick. It’s always so easy when you just sit down and think about it.