The Blindside Hypothesis: Part 1

Michael Lewis' wonderful book (and I don't say that just because he footnoted me in the book, pg 100 if anyone cares) about the life of Michael Oher notes that the left tackle is more often than not, the second highest paid player on an NFL team. What is particularly striking about that fact is that many of the NFL decision makers that Lewis interviewed did not know it and could not explain why that was the case. This thought is further advanced in the film made of the book when Sandra Bullock likens paying left tackles to buying insurance.

While linemen are vital to any offense, due largely to the fact that no publicly available statistics are available for them, they are often an after thought of the fan and apparently of some professionals. If professionals are not aware of the salary standing of left tackles relative to the rest of the team, they probably not well informed on the relative salaries of the rest of the line, and why large disparities exist between line mates. In order to more closely examine linemen pay, I combined the salary data from USA Today with the games started data from PFR. This allowed me to calculated the average salary and cap number of starting linemen by position.

	Salary	Cap Space
LT	$          3,575,265	$            3,923,691
LG	$          2,431,490	$            2,868,801
C	$          2,862,943	$            2,694,972
RG	$          1,395,010	$            1,609,293
RT	$          2,824,596	$            2,176,198

The data on linemen salary show that, on average, left tackles are paid 64% more than their line mates and teams use 80% more cap space on left tackles than on other linemen.  As of last year, the closest position to LT's in pay was RT and they were paid on average, $700,000 less than LTs. Teams use more than $1mil more on cap space than the next closest position on the line (LGs). These very large disparities beg the question, is the left tackle worth it or alternatively, why are their line mats not worth more?

In order to begin to answer these questions, we need to begin by answering some more basic questions. For example, is there a link between money spent on offensive linemen, and offensive performance.  Once we calculate the average salary and cap space that teams spent on their starting line last season (see table below) we can begin to answer this by looking at correlations between those salaries and the performance of the offense.

Team	Total Salary	Cap Value
49ers	$          3,066,833	$            3,632,999
Bears	$          4,159,756	$            3,419,117
Bengals	$          1,439,993	$            1,792,931
Bills	$          1,836,777	$            1,022,468
Broncos	$          1,591,193	$            1,938,308
Browns	$          2,349,000	$            3,444,333
Buccaneers	$          1,449,848	$            2,787,048
Cardinals	$          2,581,334	$            2,804,084
Chargers	$          1,427,108	$            1,707,240
Chiefs	$          2,079,990	$            1,943,164
Colts	$          2,872,784	$            2,606,066
Cowboys	$          2,787,103	$            3,043,357
Dolphins	$          5,167,467	$            3,157,894
Eagles	$          2,623,413	$            3,280,240
Falcons	$          1,774,780	$            1,363,322
Giants	$          3,305,000	$            5,037,584
Jaguars	$          2,532,326	$            1,970,106
Jets	$          4,191,848	$            5,007,598
Lions	$          3,534,920	$            2,963,993
Packers	$          1,924,336	$            2,378,670
Panthers	$          3,043,496	$            2,966,222
Patriots	$          2,807,733	$            3,150,845
Raiders	$          2,164,503	$            2,036,698
Rams	$             883,730	$            1,017,063
Ravens	$          1,551,713	$            1,443,419
Redskins	$          2,132,200	$            2,511,252
Saints	$          2,480,208	$            1,895,449
Seahawks	$          1,807,744	$            2,282,744
Steelers	$          4,848,176	$            2,781,576
Texans	$          1,941,447	$            1,777,930
Titans	$          3,050,770	$            3,925,770
Vikings	$          2,070,066	$            3,261,142

Looking for correlations between salary/cap and offensive performance suggests that there are three areas that in which increased spending on the line are related to better offensive performance: sacks, interceptions and yards per catch. The effect on sacks seems fairly straightforward and something we should expect if the market for linemen is at all related to the insurance part of the Blindside hypothesis. The relationship between linemen and salary could be related as better linemen (ie higher cost linemen) may provide the QB more time and thus are less likely to make poor throws, which is similar to the story we could tell about the relationship between linemen salary and yards per catch.

As I continue to explore the value of linemen in the next few posts, the goal is to rigorously test the Blindside hypothesis and determine if LT's salaries are particularly high due, in part, to concerns on insurance and whether that fully explains the large disparities between LT's and the rest of the line.