Overview

NFL roster construction has fascinated me for a long time, and the more I’ve studied it the more I’ve come to believe that salary cap management is one of the most underappreciated skills in the sport. There are a lot of ways to build a winning team, but getting above-market value out of your contracts is something every contender seems to have in common. Understanding the structure behind a deal matters just as much as knowing the dollar amount attached to a player’s name, so I built three Excel workbooks that look at how the league’s highest-paid skill position players have performed relative to their cap numbers from 2022 through 2024, then cross-referenced that against my own curated lists of what I consider the best team-friendly and player-friendly deals in the league.

The first workbook pulled the top ten highest-paid players at QB, RB, WR, and TE and tracked their cap hits alongside EPA per play, volume metrics, and a Performance Value Score I calculated by dividing cap-adjusted EPA by efficiency. The point wasn’t just to rank players. It was to see whether the money was actually tracking performance over time, and in a lot of cases it isn’t. The second and third workbooks got more personal. Using contract data from Over The Cap, I picked 14 players across every position group on both offense and defense and broke each deal apart year by year: base salary, signing bonus, roster bonus, workout bonus, and guaranteed money. Two contracts can carry the same AAV and look completely different once you understand where the guarantees sit and how the salary escalates across the life of the deal.

The visuals below were built in R using ggplot2 and pull directly from the data in those workbooks. They’re meant to make the analysis easier to absorb at a glance, identifying which players are outperforming their deals, which QBs are actually worth their cap space in 2024, which wide receivers have been consistently efficient across three seasons, and how much cheaper my team-friendly picks are compared to their player-friendly counterparts at the same position. Individually each chart answers a specific question, but together they reflect a broader way of thinking about contracts that I find genuinely useful when trying to understand how rosters get built and where the real competitive advantages tend to hide.

Visuals

Chart 1 of 8 — Portfolio Summary Panel

This opening panel gives a high-level view of two things at once: how my team-friendly cap commitments are distributed across position groups, and which wide receivers have been the most efficient over the last three seasons. It’s meant to frame everything that follows before the charts get more granular.

Chart 2 of 8 — 2024 Performance Value Scatter

Every skill position player in the 2024 season plotted by cap hit and EPA per play, with bubble size showing how much they were actually used. The dashed line at zero is the breakeven point, and anyone below it is losing value on a per-play basis no matter what their contract says.

Chart 3 of 8 — QB Cap Efficiency Quadrant

Quarterback is the position where contract decisions make or break a franchise, so it gets its own deep dive. This quadrant sorts 2024 QBs into four categories based on cap hit and efficiency thresholds, and the players in the top-left are the ones you build around.

Chart 4 of 8 — QB Performance Trend 2022-2024

The quadrant shows where each QB landed in 2024, but this chart shows how they got there. Three seasons of EPA per play plotted as small multiples, with point size scaling to cap hit so you can see whether performance and pay are actually moving in the same direction.

Chart 5 of 8 — WR EPA/Target Heat Map

Wide receiver is where a lot of cap money goes and where a lot of it gets wasted. This heat map shows EPA per target for every WR in the dataset across all three seasons, warmer colors mean higher efficiency, and the ordering by three-year average makes consistency easy to spot quickly.

Chart 6 of 8 — 2024 Value Per Dollar Ranking

This is the chart that cuts through the noise. EPA per play divided by cap hit in millions, ranked across all four positions for 2024. It’s a deliberately simple metric, but it surfaces the deals that analytics departments quietly love: high output, low cost.

Chart 7 of 8 — Team-Friendly vs Player-Friendly AAV by Position

Shifting from performance into contract structure, this chart puts my team-friendly and player-friendly selections side by side at each position. The gap between the two bars is essentially the market premium a player is capturing, or the value a team is retaining.

Chart 8 of 8 — Estimated Cap Savings by Position

The closing chart puts a number on the argument. Green bars show positions where my team-friendly pick is cheaper than the player-friendly counterpart by that AAV amount. It’s a direct measure of surplus value, and it’s the clearest way to see where the real leverage in contract negotiation tends to live.