Smelly McUgly
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I know that much has already been said about the prowess of Seahawks GM John Schneider, but I could not stop thinking about how Schneider reminds me of another out-of-the-box general manager.
I did not know that I was not only interested in economics, but that I could easily understand basic economic concepts, until I read author Michael Lewis' Moneyball a few years ago. I picked it up at a book sale for two dollars because of the raves that it received from sports fans all over internet message boards. As it turned out, I came for the baseball and left with a deep appreciation of market inequities and how smart people can exploit these inequities before anyone else even realizes that such inequities exist. That book opened my eyes to concepts that I would not have tried to understand otherwise, and it led me to reading more about economics, markets, and other related topics.
However, I find myself coming back to sports in order to try and apply the core concepts that I learned of in Moneyball. Mostly, I find myself ending up thinking that John Schneider is football's answer to Billy Beane. Sure, they face somewhat different challenges - Beane must field competitive teams with a small budget in an uncapped market; Schneider must contend with a mostly-hard cap that limits the amount of Paul Allen's money that he may spend. However, both men excel at playing the markets available to them to their advantages.
The most obvious area in which Beane and Schneider share success is in spending draft capital in wise and efficient ways. This goes far beyond simply drafting talent effectively in later rounds, however. The key to their success is in their ability to scout a player that is deficient in a superficial way and to see how that superficiality is actually not so important at all. Moneyball spends quite a bit of time talking about Beane's acquisition of effective players such as Chad Bradford, ignored by other teams because of his odd release point, and his drafting of a catcher that is derided by the scouts for looking bad in blue jeans.
Obviously, the biggest acquisition of this type that John Schneider has made in the NFL draft is Russell Wilson. Wilson's height was made a great issue, so much so that even though all of his other tools were first-round tools, he slipped to the Seahawks at 75 where Schneider had to be convinced to wait in order to take him. This is a recurring event for Seahawks fans every year in the draft. Richard Sherman switched positions from WR to CB at Stanford and was snagged in the fifth round precisely for that reason (and because, possibly, of some poor recommendations from then-Stanford HC Jim Harbaugh and his above-average height for hte position). Kam Chancellor fell to the fourth round in part because some folks projected him as a linebacker rather than a strong safety, but the Schneider and the Seahawks identified that he could cover at the NFL level.
Beyond that, Beane and Schneider have an understanding of how to approach both the free agent market in ways that allow them to snag good players at low prices. For Beane, this involves identifying an undervalued ability (like the ability to get on base consistently) that allows him to acquire good players with this ability for little capital.
Schneider, on the other hand, is a master of judging supply and demand. When this free agency period started, I daresay that neither Michael Bennett nor Cliff Avril were identified as potential targets by most Seahawk fans. However, in retrospect, it is easy to see that the glut of pass-rushers in free agency combined with the glut of low-cost pass-rushing prospects in the draft practically guaranteed that neither Avril nor Bennett would receive long-term deals for nine, ten, or eleven million dollars a year (Avril's goal to make Mario Williams money seems like it was always fantastically irrational at this point).
One of the major issues that I had with Ryan Grigson winning the Sporting News Executive of the Year Award over John Schneider is that Grigson's best move was the most obvious one - selecting Andrew Luck with the first pick in that year's NFL Draft. Schneider found value in nearly every round, on the other hand, from the first (Bruce Irvin's eight sacks leading the league for rookies) to the seventh (J.R. Sweezy looks to be the RG of the future for this team, and his successful positional switch reminds me of Scott Hatteberg's similar positional switch that Lewis covered in Moneyball). This year, Grigson is throwing around money as though it is going out of style, and at average-to-below average players, too. With Glenn Dorsey still on the market and some solid 3-4 DT prospects in a deep draft this year, Grigson overpaid Ricky-Jean Francois and then followed it up by giving a middling 3-4 OLB, Erik Walden, an unnecessarily generous deal.
Meanwhile, Schneider spent 20M on two above-average pass-rushers, one of which can slide inside and generate interior pressure on obvious passing downs. I, for one, displayed no imagination, thinking that Seattle would be left to deal with the likes of John Abraham and Dwight Freeney. This is because I would be a terrible stockbroker. Schneider, on the other hand, identified the overabundance of supply and relative lack of demand in the defensive end market. He made calls that I never would have made to the agents of Cliff Avril and Michael Bennett because he was quick to adapt to a rapidly-changing market.
This is the key to Schneider's success. He understands these core concepts of supply and demand in a way that I did not even begin to grasp on my first day of Economics 101. He looks at the market and sees opportunity where the rest of us see limits, and then he gets creative.
Schneider's ability to spot great, even generational, talent that is being heavily undervalued due to superficialities in the draft, combined with his creativity in adapting to and aggressively taking advantage of market inequities in free agency, allows him cap flexibility that many other teams simply do not have. He can take on good-to-great players at contracts far below their actual positional value; that leaves him room to make a splash with some of the extra capital he has at his disposal. The Percy Harvin trade from earlier this week reminds me quite a bit of the splash that Beane made with Yoenis Cespedes last year; it was unexpected, for one, and people questioned the outlay of resources put toward both guys (that Cespedes posting fee was pretty costly, if I recall correctly). Of course, Cespedes helped power the Athletics to an unexpected AL West championship last year; he was the dynamic piece of the puzzle for the A's, the player that put them over the top. I hope that this final parallel will be drawn between Harvin and he this year, and Harvin can put the Seahawks over the top not only in the NFC West, but in all the NFL, period.
This is an exciting time to be a Seahawk fan not only because of the team that the 'Hawks are going to field next year, but because the GM that configures these teams is here for the long haul, and his ability to recognize market inequities, like Beane's, means that you can never discount any of his moves in the market, nor any of the teams that he puts on the field.
I did not know that I was not only interested in economics, but that I could easily understand basic economic concepts, until I read author Michael Lewis' Moneyball a few years ago. I picked it up at a book sale for two dollars because of the raves that it received from sports fans all over internet message boards. As it turned out, I came for the baseball and left with a deep appreciation of market inequities and how smart people can exploit these inequities before anyone else even realizes that such inequities exist. That book opened my eyes to concepts that I would not have tried to understand otherwise, and it led me to reading more about economics, markets, and other related topics.
However, I find myself coming back to sports in order to try and apply the core concepts that I learned of in Moneyball. Mostly, I find myself ending up thinking that John Schneider is football's answer to Billy Beane. Sure, they face somewhat different challenges - Beane must field competitive teams with a small budget in an uncapped market; Schneider must contend with a mostly-hard cap that limits the amount of Paul Allen's money that he may spend. However, both men excel at playing the markets available to them to their advantages.
The most obvious area in which Beane and Schneider share success is in spending draft capital in wise and efficient ways. This goes far beyond simply drafting talent effectively in later rounds, however. The key to their success is in their ability to scout a player that is deficient in a superficial way and to see how that superficiality is actually not so important at all. Moneyball spends quite a bit of time talking about Beane's acquisition of effective players such as Chad Bradford, ignored by other teams because of his odd release point, and his drafting of a catcher that is derided by the scouts for looking bad in blue jeans.
Obviously, the biggest acquisition of this type that John Schneider has made in the NFL draft is Russell Wilson. Wilson's height was made a great issue, so much so that even though all of his other tools were first-round tools, he slipped to the Seahawks at 75 where Schneider had to be convinced to wait in order to take him. This is a recurring event for Seahawks fans every year in the draft. Richard Sherman switched positions from WR to CB at Stanford and was snagged in the fifth round precisely for that reason (and because, possibly, of some poor recommendations from then-Stanford HC Jim Harbaugh and his above-average height for hte position). Kam Chancellor fell to the fourth round in part because some folks projected him as a linebacker rather than a strong safety, but the Schneider and the Seahawks identified that he could cover at the NFL level.
Beyond that, Beane and Schneider have an understanding of how to approach both the free agent market in ways that allow them to snag good players at low prices. For Beane, this involves identifying an undervalued ability (like the ability to get on base consistently) that allows him to acquire good players with this ability for little capital.
Schneider, on the other hand, is a master of judging supply and demand. When this free agency period started, I daresay that neither Michael Bennett nor Cliff Avril were identified as potential targets by most Seahawk fans. However, in retrospect, it is easy to see that the glut of pass-rushers in free agency combined with the glut of low-cost pass-rushing prospects in the draft practically guaranteed that neither Avril nor Bennett would receive long-term deals for nine, ten, or eleven million dollars a year (Avril's goal to make Mario Williams money seems like it was always fantastically irrational at this point).
One of the major issues that I had with Ryan Grigson winning the Sporting News Executive of the Year Award over John Schneider is that Grigson's best move was the most obvious one - selecting Andrew Luck with the first pick in that year's NFL Draft. Schneider found value in nearly every round, on the other hand, from the first (Bruce Irvin's eight sacks leading the league for rookies) to the seventh (J.R. Sweezy looks to be the RG of the future for this team, and his successful positional switch reminds me of Scott Hatteberg's similar positional switch that Lewis covered in Moneyball). This year, Grigson is throwing around money as though it is going out of style, and at average-to-below average players, too. With Glenn Dorsey still on the market and some solid 3-4 DT prospects in a deep draft this year, Grigson overpaid Ricky-Jean Francois and then followed it up by giving a middling 3-4 OLB, Erik Walden, an unnecessarily generous deal.
Meanwhile, Schneider spent 20M on two above-average pass-rushers, one of which can slide inside and generate interior pressure on obvious passing downs. I, for one, displayed no imagination, thinking that Seattle would be left to deal with the likes of John Abraham and Dwight Freeney. This is because I would be a terrible stockbroker. Schneider, on the other hand, identified the overabundance of supply and relative lack of demand in the defensive end market. He made calls that I never would have made to the agents of Cliff Avril and Michael Bennett because he was quick to adapt to a rapidly-changing market.
This is the key to Schneider's success. He understands these core concepts of supply and demand in a way that I did not even begin to grasp on my first day of Economics 101. He looks at the market and sees opportunity where the rest of us see limits, and then he gets creative.
Schneider's ability to spot great, even generational, talent that is being heavily undervalued due to superficialities in the draft, combined with his creativity in adapting to and aggressively taking advantage of market inequities in free agency, allows him cap flexibility that many other teams simply do not have. He can take on good-to-great players at contracts far below their actual positional value; that leaves him room to make a splash with some of the extra capital he has at his disposal. The Percy Harvin trade from earlier this week reminds me quite a bit of the splash that Beane made with Yoenis Cespedes last year; it was unexpected, for one, and people questioned the outlay of resources put toward both guys (that Cespedes posting fee was pretty costly, if I recall correctly). Of course, Cespedes helped power the Athletics to an unexpected AL West championship last year; he was the dynamic piece of the puzzle for the A's, the player that put them over the top. I hope that this final parallel will be drawn between Harvin and he this year, and Harvin can put the Seahawks over the top not only in the NFC West, but in all the NFL, period.
This is an exciting time to be a Seahawk fan not only because of the team that the 'Hawks are going to field next year, but because the GM that configures these teams is here for the long haul, and his ability to recognize market inequities, like Beane's, means that you can never discount any of his moves in the market, nor any of the teams that he puts on the field.
