At the halfway mark of the season, I wanted to check in on the league’s passing offenses by looking at two variables: salary cap dollars allocated to quarterbacks and offensive Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt. That is shown in the graph below.

Or, better yet, let’s redraw that graph.

The green circle is obviously the place to be: this is where, for now, the Cowboys, Chiefs, Ravens, and Texans are with Dak Prescott, Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, and Deshaun Watson.  Jackson probably isn’t an MVP-caliber quarterback just yet, but the Ravens certainly aren’t complaining; the other three are in the MVP discussion, or in the case of Mahomes, have already won one.

The blue circle is a good place to be, too.  This is what these teams were hoping for — and expected — when they handed large contracts to Russell Wilson, Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, and Philip Rivers, and also what they were hoping for (and maybe weren’t quite so confident that they’d get) from Kirk Cousins, Matthew Stafford, and Derek Carr.  Life is good in the blue circle.

The red circle is the mash unit, These are teams that have been burned by either injuries to Cam Newton, Ben Roethlisberger or Alex Smith, or by giving a large contract to Eli Manning.  Next year, the Giants should be on the far left of this chart with Daniel Jones, although whether they are at the top or bottom of the Y-Axis is the real question.

The yellow circle — no, you don’t want me to use that color here — is the warning circle. You’ve got the Bears and Mitchell Trubisky, along with the highly drafted quarterbacks from the 2018 Draft : the Browns (Baker Mayfield), the Jets (Sam Darnold), the Dolphins (Josh Rosen, via trade of course) — and maaaybe the Bills (Josh Allen).

The Patriots and 49ers are a bit of their own circle. They have franchise quarterbacks but are not paying them huge cap dollars in 2019. In the case of Tom Brady, that’s because he’s taken less than market deals; in the case of Jimmy Garopppolo, it’s because his contract was massively frontloaded. The two teams are also aligned (and separated from the Falcons) by the fact that they have dominant defenses this year.

Meanwhile, the Bucs and Titans are right next to each other, as it is written must always be.

What stands out to you?

Of course, the Jets, Bills, and Browns all drafted quarterbacks in the first round of the 2019 Draft, while the Giants, Lions, and Vikings are all paying big dollars to veteran quarterbacks. How would the data look if we excluded the top (by salary cap dollars) quarterback on each team?

I re-ran those numbers today.  Once again, we will be using the Concentration Index, described here, to “grade” each team’s roster construction. To summarize, we do the following steps:

1) Calculate the 2019 salary cap hit of the top 51 players on each team’s roster. Thanks to Over The Cap, I was able to collect this information.  Eliminate the highest paid QB on each team’s roster.

2) For each player on each team, calculate the percentage of team salary cap dollars spent on that player. For example, Denver’s Von Miller has a 2019 cap hit of $25.1M, and the Broncos top 50 players (excluding QB Joe Flacco) have a cap hit of $142M. Therefore, Miller is taking up 17.7% of Denver’s non-Flacco 2019 cap spend.

3) Square the result for each player (so Miller’s 17.7% becomes 3.1%), and then sum those results for each player on each team to get team grades.

By squaring the results, you give more weight to players taking up a larger percentage of their team’s pie.   The graph below shows each team.  The X-Axis shows the 2019 Salary Cap dollars each team spent on their 50 highest paid players, excluding their top quarterback.  The Y-Axis is the concentration index result.  The Broncos are at the top of the chart, thanks in large part due to Miller.  Ignoring Flacco, Denver’s top 6 players (Miller, Emmanuel Sanders, Derek Wolfe, Ronald Leary, Chris Harris, Jr., and newly-added Ja’Wuan James) are being paid $75M 2019 cap dollars, while the Broncos bottom 37 players (in their top 51) are being paid just $35.3M. That’s an extreme “studs and duds” approach that becomes even more clear once you remove all top-paid quarterbacks.

The Giants still come in as very star-focused, as do the Dolphins, Jaguars, and Chargers. But perhaps the most interesting team is the Cowboys, who ranked in the middle on yesterday’s list. In 2019, 30 of the 32 teams are paying a quarterback at least $3.5M cap dollars; only the Cowboys and Ravens are not (and, for what it’s worth, Baltimore has $16M of dead cap money on its book in 2019 for Flacco). But Dallas has spent the second-most 2019 cap dollars (behind only the Browns) on today’s list, and it’s pretty highly concentrated.

Just seven players — Demarcus Lawrence, Tyron Smith, Zack Martin, Amari Cooper, Travis Frederick, Tyrone Crawford, and La’el Collins are costing Dallas $95.0M cap dollars in 2019. Meanwhile, 39 of the team’s top 51 players (including Prescott) are costing the team less than $3M to their 2019 cap.

On the low side of the spectrum, the Bills are still the team that has spread things around the most, but the 2nd-least concentrated team is the New England Patriots. Let’s compare the Patriots to the Cowboys. New England’s top 7 players (excluding, of course, Tom Brady) cost their 2019 cap $73M: they are Stephon Gilmore, Devin McCourty, Rob Gronkowski, Dont’a Hightower, Marcus Cannon, Shaquille Mason, and Michael Bennett. But the Patriots have a healthy middle class, with 11 players cost the team between $3.0 and $7.0M; the Cowboys have just four.