Salary Cap Changing NFL Front Office Markets

The NFL, and it's hard cap system, has long been lauded for its perceived parity. Especially in the early 200os it seemed like new teams were in the playoffs every year and that dynasties were a thing of the past. But then a funny thing happened last year. Only 1 team won double digit games and wasn't at least 8-8 the year before. That team was the Browns, a team that sort of caught fire and a popular pick to regress this year.

In Michael Lewis' Moneyball, for all its faults, he states a pretty simple fact about sports: professional sports leagues are markets, and need to be approached as such. Billy Beane doesn't love OBP as much as he realized that other teams failed to realize its importance, and as such it was an undervalued commodity. 

And in the NFL more than any other sport, roster depth has an enormous effect on a team's success. When you have to evaluate and maintain 55 players, as opposed to 14 (really only 10-12) in the NBA and 25 at any given time in MLB, the market for informed personnel decision makers should go through the roof. You simply can't find 3 guys and let them win a title. You can't stack your rotation and hope they carry you. The guys that make the decisions in the NFL have moved past any serious issues with the salary cap and now we're seeing consistency and continuity becoming the law of the land. This really does not bode well for teams like the 49ers trying to unseat well run teams like the Seahawks and Bucs in the NFC, as it seems more and more likely that those 1 and 2 year turnaround plans of the past need to become 3 and 4 year plans.