Selected Passages
Selected passages
Their findings boiled down to one foundational principle. The only players who have a direct impact on every single play are the hulking grunts on the offensive and defensive lines. If you controlled the line of scrimmage, they told Banner, you won the game.
It took the end of a five-year legal battle between defensive end Reggie White and the NFL in 1993 to usher in the new era. The league’s attorney in the case had warned in closing arguments that unrestricted free agency “would be the destruction of the National Football League that we know today.” Note: they always predict doomsday and more often than not are incredibly wrong
“Find the best football players who have character and love to play the game,” says Phil Savage, Newsome’s first director of college scouting with the Ravens. “It was a simplified statement that everybody could understand.” ... The Ravens came to rely on plain old yards, catches, sacks, and touchdowns. What mattered most was what a player had already accomplished.
Those who understood the rules did their best to comply quickly. But those who properly interpreted those constraints simply invented ways around them.
Snead and McVay had to ask themselves the tough question that any successful team must answer about the single most important employee at the franchise, their quarterback. Are we winning because of him, winning with him, or winning in spite of him?
“If it’s inevitable,” as Snead liked to say, “make it immediate.”
What Roseman grasped as well as anyone in the history of the NFL, however, was that consistent success didn’t stem from dodging the consequences of your own roster construction. The real skill was in delaying them for as long as possible.
Schneider wasn’t a big believer in three-year plans, much less five. He understood that the modern NFL was a year-to-year conundrum. Because of the way contracts are structured, as much as 75 to 80 percent of your roster isn’t guaranteed to stick around for the following season. So the incentives of the locker room and the front office are often misaligned. For players, every game is an audition tape for the thirty-one other teams. They don’t care about long-term planning. All they want is to be put in a position where they can have individual success right now. That turnover is what makes the NFL uniquely hard. Any front office that thinks it can plan anything five years out is kidding itself.