You Are What You Spend Your Cap Space On
How does the Giants first week of free agency fit in the bigger picture?
If a Head Coach’s resume can be boiled down to “You are what your record is”, the GM’s version should be “You are what you spend your cap space on”.
A reflex question to that statement is probably “what about the draft?” but that’s baked into a team’s cap health not just with premium picks carrying meaningful cap hits, but also with extensions of quality players beyond their rookie deals. Drafting well enough to extend homegrown players is a key factor keeping the cap healthy to minimize the risky top end of free agency. Not drafting well leaves you flush with money to spend and the only way to spend it has lower odds than most casino games.
In the last week we’ve seen the Giants determine their more expensive homegrown players from the prior regime weren’t worth keeping, so they instead played the free agent game to the tune of the 4th most spent overall and 6th most in guarantees.
This post will explore the choices they made in doing so and what they tell us.
You Can Never Pay Too Many Pass Rushers
Brian Burns’ $141m total contract and $76m full guarantee represent not only the biggest non-QB contract in NYG history but also the 3rd largest non-QB contract in league history behind only Nick Bosa’s $170m and Chris Jones’ $158m. 5 years younger than Chris Jones, there’s a good chance his contract ends up out-earning every active non-QB contract except Nick Bosa.
Putting aside assessment of Burns the player, his $28.2m AAV brings the projected active roster AAV in the front 7 up to the 6th most in the NFL at just over $80m total, disproportionally representing 34% of the team’s total cap space on 24% of it’s active roster players (13 out of a total 53). They’re about $20m behind the 2 teams spending the most, Pittsburgh and San Francisco, but that’s mostly a feature of those teams not having as many starters still on rookie contracts.
Browse OTC’s projected franchise tags for 2025 and you’ll see pass rushers are trending towards the most expensive non-QB position, so it appears the Giants are once again of the mindset that you can never have enough (or pay enough for them).
The Freshly Minted Second Most Expensive Unit
After adding Jon Runyan ($10m per year) and Jermaine Eluemunor ($7m per year) to Andrew Thomas’ $23.5m and Evan Neal’s $6.1m the OL is trending in the necessary direction. The unit’s total active roster AAV is now approximately $55m across 10 players, assuming the 5 backups are around the minimum.
That amount would put them right around the back end of the top 10 league wide. It would also represent an outsized share of the cap with 10 players (18% of the 53 man spots) accounting for 22% of the team’s AAV at the current cap.
Taken together with the EDGE position group, the active roster could have 23 players in the EDGE + OL rooms who represent 43% of the team’s players, being paid AAV around 54% of this year’s total cap.
The OL room is about $20m behind the new league leader Carolina after their offensive guard spending spree, so as much as they’ve invested it’s possible they still should have invested more. But spending specifically on players with better reputations as pass protectors is a welcomed sight. If last year wasn’t the OL rock bottom among the last decade of failures it will be the downfall of yet another regime.
Healthy Cap, Wealthy Free Agents
Even after spending big the Giants’ cap looks healthy. As much as they spent, they actually had the room to spend more if they chose to. It would have been pretty easy to accommodate paying Mike Onwenu more than double what Jermaine Eluemunor was paid per year if they felt there was a talent gap worthy of the extra money. It currently seems more likely than not that Waller is going to retire, which would save the team almost that entire delta with more than $10.5m in cash they won’t spend 2024 along with a full $15.4m in 2025 - so that is an easy “core slot” that could have been accessed if they were able to.
Here’s a chart I’ve shown before, now updated with this past week’s moves showing the teams multi-year outlays to it’s most expensive players signed for 3+ years:
It’s usually surprising when people realize teams typically have only 5-10 veteran players on their roster signed beyond 2 years that comprise the team’s “core”.
Not to be overly obvious but these are the players that are hardest to find, most in-demand, most expensive, and most responsible for delivering value above replacement that leads a team to wins. The players you want in your core everyone else does too, which is why free agency is so expensive even though many core players never get to the open market.
Ideally teams are developing draft picks like Kayvon Thibodeaux to expand the core as they did with Dexter Lawrence and Andrew Thomas last year, but the chance to add a 2x pro bowl starter entering age 26 like Burns, who can double down on a premium position, was an opportunity worth the costs. Especially if they end up moving into a rookie scale QB cycle next year.
What’s left on the offseason ‘to do’ list?
Cap space isn’t unlimited but they have enough room to continue adding depth over the next month with low risk stop gap free agents. Preserving what could be a 3rd or 4th round comp pick in 2025 from the McKinney departure should be a priority, which would focus them on FA non-qualifiers and those with price tags under $3m.
I’m a big believer in selecting from the strengths of a draft and in next month’s draft the QB and WR classes are the strongest since the current regime came to the Giants. Adding high end talent at both positions from their 2 top 50 picks would be a best case scenario. For the right QB 2025 picks should be in play. Hitting on the right QB or WR could be a force multiplier for an offense that appears to badly need it.
Quality talents at WR & QB would give the roster a nice blend of rookie and veteran talent at the 3 most expensive positions (QB, EDGE, WR) in combination with some nice existing investments in the next 4 most expensive positions (OL, DT, LB, CB).
However much they spend doesn’t matter if they don’t get the players right but strategically it’s exciting to see them investing so heavily at the line of scrimmage.