Looking at Spotrac... Noticed a few VERY interesting things

[KB_fan]

Hey all,

A few of you have been very kind to let me know you miss some of the data analysis I used to do, and in particular, to ask if I can do some similar roster analysis by position groups as I did last year in the offseason.  I'm just beginning to see quite a lot of light at the end of the tunnel in terms of a lighter workload with my job, after a pretty insane 6-8 months, and looking forward to doing some roster analysis very soon...

Toward that end, I was browsing around some of the Panthers pages at Spotrac tonight.  Spotrac is not a site I usually spend a lot of time on, except this time of year.   It's probably been 8 - 10 months since I've been over there.  It looks to me as if they've revised the site a bit.  I landed on a page which looked quite different from what I remembered, and which I found VERY VERY helpful in giving a quick "at-a-glance" overview of how things stand in terms of contracts & free agents, position by position.

http://www.spotrac.com/nfl/carolina-panthers/

Here are a couple of the facts that just JUMPED off the page at me.

Shocking Observation #1

 I was STUNNED to see how little we're paying for WR.  Of course Ted Ginn is a pending free agent, so this could change fairly soon if we re-sign him, but even so, we're investing much less at WR than ANY OTHER POSITION on the team, only 4.8 million contracted for this position right now for 2017, which is really surprising for a position where we usually have 5 or 6 players on the 53.  Heck, we're spending nearly twice as much for SPECIAL TEAMS than WR!  Yikes.

Looks like an open door for bringing in some new talent, which we sorely need.  I wonder if we have been spending near the least on WR in the league?  Might be interesting to research...  Maybe I just find this particularly shocking in comparison to the Antonio Brown signing. 1 player getting 4 times what our whole current WR corps is getting.  Wow.

 

Here's a closer look at the WRs on our Roster. 

This is clearly a position where we're back in re-build mode after high hopes last offseason that we were developing some good talent and stability after a few years of churning.  It didn't happen.  Yes, I think some of the guys like Damiere Byrd, Key Garrett, and Philly Brown still have lots of upside, but really, at least in terms of proven players, pretty much apart from KB we have a clean slate... Funch certainly is not yet proven.  He didn't have a good year in 2016.  I'm not as confident about him as I was following his rookie season...  Looking at the above, I really HOPE we do re-sign Ted Ginn for a reasonable amount.  YES, bring in new blood and competition too both via free agency & the draft, but without Ginn we would have HUGE holes at WR.

 

Shocking Observation #2:
Counting pending free agents, we currently have an INCREDIBLE total of 18 Olinemen on the roster, Yes, 18, including 8 tackles, and yet even amidst all those bodies we don't have much talent or any certainty at EITHER RT or LT.  NO CERTAINTY at all. 

 

Of course a lot of these guys are just camp bodies / practice squad guys and many may soon be gone..., but truly this is a position disaster, and it looks like our Front Office is just throwing up stuff onto the wall and hoping something sticks - or hoping they find a diamond in the manure pile. (Granted, they did a pretty good job sniffing out Andrew Norwell, and also Tyler Larsen as a potential backup Center looked very solid and rose from the heap.  Really hope we keep him... but Cs and Gs are much easier to find than franchise Left Tackles.)

We can't assume Oher will be back.  We MUST assume he's likely not going to play.  Remmers has proven to be a liability, (although I'm ok if we re-sign him as depth and potential back up at both RT and LT if D. Williams starts at RT in 2017.  At least Remmer's a better back up LT option than DAVID FOUCAULT!)

We've GOT to sign a proven vet during free agency to shore up LT.  MUST. MUST. MUST.  If Dave doesn't do it, I will be jumping on the Gettle-bashing bandwagon headfirst.

 

So, those are the two big things that jumped out at me browsing Spotrac tonight.  

Anyone else notice anything as you browse the team roster / contract situation?  Give a look-see then comment here.

http://www.spotrac.com/nfl/carolina-panthers/

 

[cookinbrak]

We're paying 3 mil for practice squad tackles?

[arbnranger]

 You must have gotten a day off. Ha nice work as always. 

[KB_fan]

 

3 minutes ago, cookinbrak said:

We're paying 3 mil for practice squad tackles?

Looks like only 2.5 ish.... (I'm not counting Daryl Williams since he started in 2016)

but yeah still, it makes us look pretty desperate, doesn't it?!

[KB_fan]

2 minutes ago, arbnranger said:

 You must have gotten a day off. Ha nice work as always. 

Nope.  Worked a full day.  But with the time difference, it's midnight here, so I've had a few hours of free time to kill on Panthers stuff.

[KB_fan]

By the way, the Panthers.com team roster shows us as having NINE tackles on the roster, not 8.  They list Dan France as a tackle, not a guard.

[Ricky Spanish]

Glass half full analysis:

The WRs and Tackles don't deserve a lot of money so at least we're getting our money's worth and not overpaying them

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[LinvilleGorge]

I'm not shocked at all that our WR payroll is extremely low. When your WR corps consists of two guys on their rookie contracts, a former 1st round bust who was a career return man before coming here, and a couple of former undrafted FAs who are just happy to be cashing NFL paychecks then yeah, your payroll at that position had better be pretty damn low! The secondary payroll probably looks about the same.

[KB_fan]

7 minutes ago, LinvilleGorge said:

I'm not shocked at all that our WR payroll is extremely low.

Yeah, when I stop to think about it, it makes total sense and shouldn't be shocking to me.  It was just seeing HOW much less we've currently got invested at WR than any other position group on the team which was a real wake-up call. 

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.  It just shows me that we still have big holes there, little consistent proven production worth paying (except for KB, and to some extent Ginn).  Lots of room to grow.  Hope a new coach and some new talent will see us bloom at this position. 

[KB_fan]

8 minutes ago, LinvilleGorge said:

The secondary payroll probably looks about the same.

More than double that of the WRs.  9.5 million currently.  But of course that includes Kurt Coleman's extension last year.

[TheSpecialJuan]

47 minutes ago, KB_fan said:

Hey all,

A few of you have been very kind to let me know you miss some of the data analysis I used to do, and in particular, to ask if I can do some similar roster analysis by position groups as I did last year in the offseason.  I'm just beginning to see quite a lot of light at the end of the tunnel in terms of a lighter workload with my job, after a pretty insane 6-8 months, and looking forward to doing some roster analysis very soon...

Toward that end, I was browsing around some of the Panthers pages at Spotrac tonight.  Spotrac is not a site I usually spend a lot of time on, except this time of year.   It's probably been 8 - 10 months since I've been over there.  It looks to me as if they've revised the site a bit.  I landed on a page which looked quite different from what I remembered, and which I found VERY VERY helpful in giving a quick "at-a-glance" overview of how things stand in terms of contracts & free agents, position by position.

http://www.spotrac.com/nfl/carolina-panthers/

Here are a couple of the facts that just JUMPED off the page at me.

Shocking Observation #1

 I was STUNNED to see how little we're paying for WR.  Of course Ted Ginn is a pending free agent, so this could change fairly soon if we re-sign him, but even so, we're investing much less at WR than ANY OTHER POSITION on the team, only 4.8 million contracted for this position right now for 2017, which is really surprising for a position where we usually have 5 or 6 players on the 53.  Heck, we're spending nearly twice as much for SPECIAL TEAMS than WR!  Yikes.

Looks like an open door for bringing in some new talent, which we sorely need.  I wonder if we have been spending near the least on WR in the league?  Might be interesting to research...  Maybe I just find this particularly shocking in comparison to the Antonio Brown signing. 1 player getting 4 times what our whole current WR corps is getting.  Wow.

 

Here's a closer look at the WRs on our Roster. 

This is clearly a position where we're back in re-build mode after high hopes last offseason that we were developing some good talent and stability after a few years of churning.  It didn't happen.  Yes, I think some of the guys like Damiere Byrd, Key Garrett, and Philly Brown still have lots of upside, but really, at least in terms of proven players, pretty much apart from KB we have a clean slate... Funch certainly is not yet proven.  He didn't have a good year in 2016.  I'm not as confident about him as I was following his rookie season...  Looking at the above, I really HOPE we do re-sign Ted Ginn for a reasonable amount.  YES, bring in new blood and competition too both via free agency & the draft, but without Ginn we would have HUGE holes at WR.

 

Shocking Observation #2:
Counting pending free agents, we currently have an INCREDIBLE total of 18 Olinemen on the roster, Yes, 18, including 8 tackles, and yet even amidst all those bodies we don't have much talent or any certainty at EITHER RT or LT.  NO CERTAINTY at all. 

 

Of course a lot of these guys are just camp bodies / practice squad guys and many may soon be gone..., but truly this is a position disaster, and it looks like our Front Office is just throwing up stuff onto the wall and hoping something sticks - or hoping they find a diamond in the manure pile. (Granted, they did a pretty good job sniffing out Andrew Norwell, and also Tyler Larsen as a potential backup Center looked very solid and rose from the heap.  Really hope we keep him... but Cs and Gs are much easier to find than franchise Left Tackles.)

We can't assume Oher will be back.  We MUST assume he's likely not going to play.  Remmers has proven to be a liability, (although I'm ok if we re-sign him as depth and potential back up at both RT and LT if D. Williams starts at RT in 2017.  At least Remmer's a better back up LT option than DAVID FOUCAULT!)

We've GOT to sign a proven vet during free agency to shore up LT.  MUST. MUST. MUST.  If Dave doesn't do it, I will be jumping on the Gettle-bashing bandwagon headfirst.

 

So, those are the two big things that jumped out at me browsing Spotrac tonight.  

Anyone else notice anything as you browse the team roster / contract situation?  Give a look-see then comment here.

http://www.spotrac.com/nfl/carolina-panthers/

 

The information in this site is incorrect. Damiere Byrd, David Yankey and Dan France are not exclusive rights free agents. They are not free agents at all. They our currently signed to the team.

[LinvilleGorge]

3 minutes ago, KB_fan said:

More than double that of the WRs.  9.5 million currently.  But of course that includes Kurt Coleman's extension last year.

That's still gotta be one of the lowest in the league I would think.

When you look at our WR, secondary, and OL units I would bet we're near the bottom of the league in payroll expenditures in all three units. OL is probably skewed a bit with Kalil's contract, but everyone else on the OL is likely making well below their position average.

The majority of our money is tied up in QB, RB, DL, and LB.

[TheSpecialJuan]

UNRESTRICTED		RESTRICTED		EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS
POS	PLAYER	POS	PLAYER	POS	PLAYER
DE	Mario Addison	WR	Brenton Bersin	DT	Chas Alecxih
WR	Ted Ginn, Jr.	WR	Philly Brown	C	Tyler Larsen
S	Michael Griffin	WR	LaRon Byrd	P	Michael Palardy
DE	Wes Horton	LB	Ben Jacobs
DE	Charles Johnson	G	Andrew Norwell
CB	Leonard Johnson
S	Colin Jones
LB	A.J. Klein
DT	Kyle Love
OT	Mike Remmers
G	Chris Scott
DT	Kawann Short
C	Ryan Wendell
RB	Fozzy Whittaker
CB	Teddy Williams

[TheSpecialJuan]

Just now, TheSpecialJuan said:

UNRESTRICTED		RESTRICTED		EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS
POS	PLAYER	POS	PLAYER	POS	PLAYER
DE	Mario Addison	WR	Brenton Bersin	DT	Chas Alecxih
WR	Ted Ginn, Jr.	WR	Philly Brown	C	Tyler Larsen
S	Michael Griffin	WR	LaRon Byrd	P	Michael Palardy
DE	Wes Horton	LB	Ben Jacobs
DE	Charles Johnson	G	Andrew Norwell
CB	Leonard Johnson
S	Colin Jones
LB	A.J. Klein
DT	Kyle Love
OT	Mike Remmers
G	Chris Scott
DT	Kawann Short
C	Ryan Wendell
RB	Fozzy Whittaker
CB	Teddy Williams

http://www.panthers.com/news/article-2/Panthers-potential-free-agents/9fb2924a-7831-465d-a21e-3d5c68c01ae5