Building a winner begins in the draft
This year’s playoff rosters had plenty of homegrown talent
INDIANAPOLIS — The Houston Texans could have easily called themselves the Houston Mercenaries during the last two seasons of general manager Nick Caserio’s rebuild. It’s quite striking to think about the lack of homegrown players on Houston’s roster recently, especially when mingling with executive and coaches who’ve flocked to the NFL scouting combine to evaluate the very sort of talent the Texans haven’t frequently fostered during their costly climb back to competitiveness.
Teams must stock their rosters with draft picks. That’s what this whole week is about, isn’t it? Take every NFL team that qualified for the playoffs last season — yes, all 14 of them. Players who were drafted by the teams they played for held a total snap share of 55.9 percent.
In other words, homegrown players accounted for more than half of the playing time for the league’s most successful teams. The Cowboys and their draft pick-heavy squad led the group (71.9), and the Jaguars were last (47.1) mostly due to a 2022 freeagency frenzy in which owner Shahid Khan spent close to a quarter-billion dollars.
A substantial disparity is revealed when analyzing the Texans’ roster. Drafted players accounted for only 30.2 percent of the team’s total snap shares in 2022, a metric even more telling when it’s considered that only 17 of the 74 Texans players who logged a snap last season (22.9 percent) were drafted by the franchise.
The shortage of draft-pick players underlines both Caserio’s overhaul strategy and the roster
building limitations he inherited upon his arrival. Former coach and general manager Bill O’Brien traded the team’s first-round picks in 2020 and 2021 in a package deal with the Dolphins for left tackle Laremy Tunsil, and Caserio filled the rosters of the last two seasons mostly with veterans on one-year deals.
Caserio downplayed the disparity in homegrown talent Tuesday, saying “players ultimately determine their performance” and that his personnel department couldn’t care less whether quality players are acquired through the draft, via free agency or as undrafted free agents. But Caserio will also make up the blatant gap by choosing from the trove of draftable prospects who will work out and interview with teams for four days at Lucas Oil Stadium.
Once the Texans return to harboring a healthy number of homegrown players, Caserio will reap both the benefits of rookie contracts and their complications. Take a first-round player like cornerback Derek Stingley Jr., whom the Texans selected No. 3 overall in 2022. He’ll carry a $7.8 million cap hit this season, according to Over the Cap, which ranks fifth-highest on the team. But that’s still less than half the average annual price of the topfive cornerback salaries in the league ($18.1 million).
If Stingley develops into a premier cornerback, Caserio has secured a bargain. If Stingley doesn’t, Caserio must manage the cost. Multiply that by every draft pick, every position, every situation, and it’s clear why draft day is so important to the success of every franchise. A collection of drafted rookies with minimum four-year salaries can create an affordable window in which teams can pursue keystone free agents whose contracts have expired and who inherently demand more money.
And it’s here, Vikings general manger Kwesi Adofo-Mensah said, that every NFL executive enters “this beautiful puzzle” of roster building that “we all try and solve.”
“There’s no wrong or right way,” said Adofo-Mensah, who joined the Vikings in 2022 after spending two seasons as vice president of football operations with the Browns. “I think you obviously want to make sure you build in the draft, because the access to the best players, the players with the ceilings, is typically in the draft. Free agency does happen, and there are some players that shake free in free agency. But now, every team wants that guy. Now it’s a competitive market. Now the prices go a little bit higher. Now, in the draft, you have a chance to grow them in your building, build a culture with them.
“But the issue is as a GM, my job isn’t to just hit on draft picks. This isn’t some dartboard I’m just throwing at. The job is to build a championship team within the time window. So yeah, if I get fired in four years and all my picks hit after that, I don’t get to go back and say, ‘Hey, look at all those people I drafted.’ It’s my job to put it all together within the same time frame, the same horizon. So it’s really just a lot of different lessons I’ve learned from various studies I’ve done, trying to put it together. But there is no one right way — just a lot of smart intentional decisions you make.”
Of course, every NFL general manager must secure a quarterback. Many an executive has been canned in the middle of a long-term pursuit of a proficient passer or following the acquisition of a quarterback who flopped. It’s the very risk Caserio and the Texans are entering. They hold the No. 2 pick, and Caserio has made it clear the Texans intend to add a quarterback either in the draft or in free agency.
Davis Mills might have awarded the Texans an unusual bargain had Caserio’s first-ever draft pick, a 2021 third-round selection out of Stanford, not regressed last season after a promising rookie campaign. Mills remains under contract for the next two seasons and won’t count for more than $1.7 million against the cap in either year. But if the Texans spend their No. 2 pick on a quarterback — Alabama’s Bryce Young, Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud, Kentucky’s Will Levis or Florida’s Anthony Richardson — they’ll enter a potentially favorable math problem that the majority of the most successful teams are currently managing.
Joe Burrow, the Bengals’ 2020 No. 1 overall pick, is entering the final year of a rookie deal that temporarily allowed the Super Bowl-contending franchise to spend the bulk of its money addressing other positions. The Bengals reached Super Bowl LVI, then lost in the AFC Championship Game last season, and now Duke Tobin, the franchise’s director of player personnel, must find a way to reach a lucrative extension with Burrow while budgeting a playoff-contending supporting cast around him.
“It’s not done yet,” Tobin said of Burrow’s contract negotiation. “You know, it’s a good problem to have. I’ve been pretty vocal about what Joe means to us. My job is to facilitate his success as best I can with putting pieces around him. His contract will get done when it gets done. But it’s a good problem to have. He’s a vital part of what we’re doing.”
Bills general manager Brandon Beane has fielded playoffbound teams in each of the two seasons since Josh Allen, Buffalo’s 2018 No. 7 overall pick, signed a six-year, $258 million extension.
“It’s definitely challenging to have a quarterback once you’re paying him,” Beane said. “Obviously, it’s, ‘Enjoy the moments when they’re on that rookie deal.’ But it’s a quarterback league, and so you just work around it. You understand it’s part of the economics of the game. I’ll take the problem of having Josh Allen and having to work around it versus being in quarterback purgatory, as people like to say. It’s part of the deal. It’s not easy. But you’re not going to hear me complain.”
But one day the bargain ends. Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts, Philadelphia’s 2020 secondround pick, is entering the final year of a contract that will count just $4.8 million against his team’s cap. Hurts made only $1.6 million last season, leading a potent Eagles offense that lost 38-35 to the Chiefs in Super Bowl LVII.
“You want me to get sentimental about how it was before we pay our quarterback?” Eagles general manager Howie Roseman quipped. “Yeah. It’s the nature of the business. The better thing is when you have a quarterback that’s good enough that you want to pay him and that he has a chance to be a great player. If you don’t have a quarterback, you’re searching for one. You can’t win in this league without a great quarterback who plays at a high level.”
Perhaps the Texans secure their next quarterback at No. 2 within the confines of a rookie deal. Perhaps that sets them toward the favorable budget window that teams with healthy percentages of homegrown players on their roster get to enjoy.