Whiffs
Today was the first day pro football’s unrestricted free agents could sign with other teams. It’s a day when most of the 32 teams each throw tens of millions of dollars on the players lucky enough to be free agents at the exact right time in the supply and demand cycle when the demand for a limited supply of players is met by an almost unlimited supply of money with which to pay them.
It’s also the time of the year after the scouting combine when teams are spending all of their time evaluating all of the college talent and trying to come up with a game plan for them to draft the key players that they are hoping will change the fortunes of their teams for years to come. The free agent system and the college draft are the two main ways that teams build up their rosters to hopefully field the best team possible to compete with the rest of the teams in the league (with the other way being through trades).
The decisions made during these months of March and April are the most important decisions the general managers and talent evaluators will make all year. THIS is the time when the architects of these teams, people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, have to decide WHO they think will be the best players to acquire for THEIR teams. They have all that money to spend. They have all of those players to evaluate. And they have to make their choices. They are hoping their choices will be great. They are hoping their choices will lead to their teams being winners. The one thing they cannot do is to WHIFF on their expensive free agent acquisitions. They cannot spend all of that free agent money on those one or two key players and have them be a bust. They cannot make that decision to draft a certain key first or second round draft choice and have those players end up being busts.
If a GM spends the bulk of his team’s free agent money on a player that turns out to be a bust, the team loses out by having their team wasting a playing spot on a player that doesn’t work out. They lose out by missing out on the player or players they could have, or should have, spent their money on. They miss out on the players that turned out to be good, while THEY selected players that weren’t good. These are players that SHOULD have been selected as members of the team but they never end up playing for the team — all because the architects were incompetent.
If a team selects a quarterback in the first round of a draft that they think will be the leader of the team for the next half dozen years, and that quarterback turns out to be horrible, that GM’s decision has set that team back for those same exact half dozen years. The GM that makes that bad decision has WHIFFED on a draft pick. The GM that spends fifty to a hundred million dollars for five years of a free agent player that turns out to be a bust has WHIFFED on an important decision for his team. These bad decisions do more damage to the team than any other factor in the entire business of football. A few bad decisions can make a team implode.
At this time of the year, football fans are hoping that their team does well at drafting good prospective players and at picking up good free agent players. They hope that their GM knows how to make those right decisions that the good teams always seem to make. Fans even think that THEY can make better decisions than the professionals that do the job for their own teams.
Maybe the fans are right. Maybe their team’s GM is right. But the decisions to put together a team have impacts on teams that last for years. You make great decisions, your team is great. You make average decisions, your team is average. But one thing you cannot do is WHIFF on a free agent pick up or high draft choice. If you do that often enough, you get a team that stinks and your fans all end up showing up at games with bags over their heads.
