Today is June 7th. At this point, Bowe Bergdahl has not been charged. He has not been given a military and/or civilian trial. While none of those things have occurred, people are threatening his family and calling him a deserter and traitor. Most of this is the result of idle speculation by the
media and politicians which has run rampant. Nobody
except Bergdahl truly knows at this point if he willingly left his
post. Lots of soldiers will complain to each other that they don't
agree w/a mission, so some of that may be out of context. As a former
infantry team leader, I can tell you that it would feel like the
ultimate betrayal for one of your own men/brothers in arms (whom you
literally trust w/your life on a day-to-day basis) to go AWOL during a
combat mission b/c he didn't like/believe in the mission. Soldiers may
sign up initially for patriotism or pay, but the reasons you see them
re-enlist or serve multiple tours is b/c they fight for one another. If
Bergdahl just walked away from that, then I completely understand if
members from his platoon/company feel resentment and anger towards him,
especially if more men were lost in the efforts to rescue/recover him (this also has not been confirmed).
However, as much as I despise betrayal, I would not leave him to be held
by the enemy. Soldiers follow the UCMJ - it's the JAG's responsibility
to judge and punish him, not the Taliban or the media. If civilians
don't like the trade that occurred or feel the judgement isn't
appropriate once all the facts are given, then they can express their
feelings in the elections and vote out those that were involved and/or
supported it
Had the US gov't decided that he wasn't
worth swapping for, the Taliban probably would have used Bergdahl for
the worst type of propaganda (i.e. he would have been tortured and executed on video similar to Daniel Pearl). In
that case, the US politicians would still be divided among party lines
second
guessing each other wondering why didn't we trade for him and our
enemies would
see us as weaker for leaving one of the members of our armed forces to
be executed while in enemy captivity.
Is his life worth the potential
trouble these prisoners can cause now that they are released?
Statistically speaking, the US has killed between 10-15 enemy combatants
in Afghanistan for every single US casualty (i.e 20-35K Taliban killed
to 2200 US armed forces so far). I don't think trading five assholes
who all have been in prison for over ten years will be a huge force
multiplier that will dramatically change the course of the war or
increase terrorism. I expect that these five will be so closely
monitored that it will be difficult for them to be anything more than
figure heads at best.
Everyone needs to stop rushing
to judgement and let discovery happen. Justice will be served. Stop threatening Bergdahl and his family w/out evidence. You
know who threatens and kills people without evidence? Terrorists
Saturday, June 7, 2014
Friday, June 6, 2014
How much is an NFL touchdown?
How much is an NFL
touchdown?
It may be more than you think
I originally posed this article on http://www.thesportsthinktank.com/ in January of 2014.
Whether you follow the NFL or not, it’s almost impossible to
not be aware of the amazing salaries that NFL players are awarded in contract
years. For example, Peyton Manning was
signed to a five-year $96M contract in 2012 with $18M of that being his salary
for first year1. To the
average person, that is almost an unimaginable amount of money. That’s lottery winning type of money. That got me thinking, if that’s how much
Denver spent on a quarterback, how much does a touchdown really cost?
To get to that number, there are a few things that need to
be accounted for. First off, how can
teams spend so much money on one player?
The answer is very simple - the NFL makes the most revenue of any
professional sport in the US. Approximately
1:3 people in the United States watch a game every week. With that many viewers, the NFL was able to
charge $4B to the TV networks in 2012 to broadcast the games. On top of that, there is even more money
generated from the tickets, merchandise, local ads and other income
sources. When everything is said and
done, the NFL brought in $9.5 Billion of revenue in 20122 which is
more than double of the NBA. If you
average that revenue out to each team, it means each owner makes approximately $296M
in revenue. That is some serious cash to
spend on a team.
However, there are more costs than just the players. The owners also have to spend money on the
stadium, practice facilities, coaching staff, etc. Unfortunately, 31 of the 32 teams are
privately held, which means I can’t easily get to those costs. Therefore, for the purposes of this article,
I am going to stick to what is public knowledge – the player’s salaries. There are limits on what the owner can spend
on player salaries, both a minimum and a maximum. As a result of the new collective bargaining
agreement with the NFL Players Association last year, the NFL salary cap per
team was set at $120.6m3. That
was put in place to keep owners of larger markets from outspending those in
smaller markets (like in MLB – so much for baseball being America’s pastime
anymore) and in theory keep all of the teams competitive. Another caveat of the agreement was that the
owners had to spend at least 89% of the salary cap amount. This keeps the owners from being too cheap
and damaging the NFL brand, a.k.a. “the shield.”
Now, going back to the Peyton Manning example, If you subtract out the $18M for Peyton, then
that leaves just over $102M for the other the other 52 members of the team
roster which needs to be broken out to offense, defense and special teams. While spending 15% of your total salary cap on
one player seems excessive, it is not that uncommon for a quarterback to get
this type of payout since he is the face of the franchise. Also, while some players may be household
names, there are many players that are more obscure and don’t get this kind of
cash. In fact, the average salary per
player is much closer to $2M with the rookie minimum coming in at $390K4
thanks to the new collective bargaining agreement.
So, now we get back to where we started. To totally understand how much a touchdown costs,
you have to include the cost of the entire offense because Peyton isn’t getting
this done by himself. Fortunately, The
Guardian5 did the heavy lifting for me and performed a team-by-team
breakdown of the cost of the offense, defense and special teams for 2012. The cost for the offense for each team (broken
out by AFC and NFC) for the 2012 season is listed in the chart below (NFL Avg is $53.6M):
As you can see above, the Manning acquisition put Denver a little on the high side for spending on the offense, but it is on par with many other offensive juggernauts such as the Saints, Packers and Patriots. Some other interesting points from the charts:
- The Tampa Bay Buccaneers (TB) spent $11M on Vincent Jackson since he was a free agent, $7+M on Josh Freeman (oops), and $20M on the on the offensive line starters
- The Tennessee Titans (TEN) had to pony up for CJ2K and spent big on three offensive linemen which equals almost $30M tied up in those four players
- The Cincinnati Bengals have been building their offense through the draft w/their starters(QB - Dalton, WR1 – AJ Green, WR2 – Sanu, G - Zeitler ) being relatively low cost
- The Indianapolis Colts (IND) also went for the build through the draft route. They got really good value from their draft picks (QB - Luck, WR - TY Hilton, TE - Fleener) and dropped Peyton from their cap which led to them having a much lower salary cost than their peers
Armed with this information, I was able to go to the NFL
statistics page and determine how many points were scored by the each team and
eventually get to a cost per point7.
Now some of you may wonder why I went to a cost per point as
opposed to per touchdown. The simple
answer is I couldn’t find the granular level of detail to really break that out
accurately... and I am hoping most of you will be ok with this. My approach takes the cost of the entire offense
and spreads their cost against how many total points they scored for the season
to give a fully loaded player cost. Why
take the entire offense? While a team
may not use all the players for scoring (I’m looking at you Brock Osweiler),
they still spent the money to have them available to play.
How much does a touchdown cost? The
average cost of a touchdown in the NFL is $896K. It’s no wonder the owners celebrate as much as
the players when they do score. Listed
below is the cost per touchdown (cost per point multiplied by six) for each
team along with the number of touchdowns they had in 2012.
- Kansas City had a terrible offense in 2012 and only put up 18 touchdowns. Eighteen?! Some teams were able to put up that many touchdowns in four games. Their cost per touchdown reflects that – over $1.6M for each one which is 1.78 times the league average. Ouch!
- New England was the exact opposite – they were a scoring machine that put up 73 touchdowns, so it only cost them $519K per touchdown.
I would assume many general managers in the NFL are striving to implement the strategy of a low cost per point on the offense. Clearly the chart above shows many have not been able to do so. Having a low cost per point doesn’t mean that you’re cheap ($18M on Peyton was not inexpensive), but rather it means that the money you spend is justified by the increased points.
Let’s prove this out by staying with the Denver Broncos
offense since we started with Peyton Manning.
In 2011 during the Tebow era, Denver had 309 total offensive points
which put them in a tie for 19th place in scoring in the NFL during
the regular season. When Denver put
Manning at the helm in the 2012 regular season, Denver moved from 19th
to second in total points in with 481 points (third including the post
season). As a result, the average cost
of a TD for Denver in 2012 was $649K, almost $250K less than other team. Elway banked on the fact that the extra money
spent on Peyton would increase the number of total points scored and he was
right. More importantly, he had money to
spend because Denver also drafted well.
For example, in 2012 wide receiver Eric Decker had a salary of $490K (drafted
2010) and tight end Julius Thomas (drafted 2011) was paid $465K. Paying for veterans in those positions could
easily cost 4X that. The lesson from
this: The key to being a successful general manager is a combination of effective
drafting and supplementing the team with the more expensive veterans in key
positions. When this isn’t done
correctly, the stats will show it and more than likely that GM will be
fired. Don’t believe me? Scott Pioli was the General Manager of the
Kansas City Chiefs in 2012. Who is their
GM this year?
Sources:
1M.
Klis and J. Legwold, The Denver Post
2C.
Isidore, CNN Money
3J
Lacanfora, NFL.com
3Bloomberg
Businessweek Magazine
4The
Bleacher Report
5H.J.
Enten, The Guardian
6NFL.com
7
Points include both the regular season and playoffs
About the Author:
Stephen
Schulist has lived in many places (ten states) and held many jobs over the past
44 years: bookseller, dock worker, stand-up comedian, infantry soldier, software
consultant and freelance writer. One
thing that has remained constant over all of those years is his love of
football and the Green Bay Packers.
While the Packers are his favorite NFL team, he has seen games at 13 NFL
stadiums (visiting the remaining stadiums is at the top of his bucket of list). He may be reached via email at TheSportsThinkTank@gmail.com or
you may follow him on twitter @SoupSandwich97.
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