I rest my case -

[TB_Helmet]

You could make pretty much the same argument against any position truly mattering, with the likely exception of coach and QB. Most the best defensive players I can remember never won a Super Bowl either. Look at the most dominant pass rushers and left tackles the league has seen over the last 15 years, and most of them haven't won any Super Bowls either. But I don't think anyone would suggest protecting the QB's blind side or rushing the passer don't matter to winning the Super Bowl.

I think this has more to do with the fact that pro bowl berths, like market-setting contracts, are generally awarded based on strange and stupid criteria that don't have nearly enough correlation to sustained, long-term winning.

And just over the last 5-7 years or so, pretty much any evaluation based on SB wins inherently has a bit of a complicating factor in that, if you weren't playing for the Patriots you probably haven't won **** because the Patriots have this strange habit of winning the Super Bowl more often than not. If the Pats are philosophically opposed to doing something, then that thing will not be correlated with recent SB wins even if it is otherwise a valid SB-contending strategy, simply because the Pats are the ones winning all the SBs.

But yeah, having said all of that I do think WRs who move the needle enough to warrant anything resembling the kind of contract that the top ones get are exceptionally rare talents. Like, of WRs playing right now, DeAndre Hopkins and maybe Julio Jones are probably the ones that I think you could give a real market-setting deal to without it being borderline organizational suicide.

Yup, agree with all points, except I'd move Jones from "maybe" to "no".

Saw a good stat earlier this year that was like, "No team has won the Super Bowl when paying a non QB a certain % of the salary cap".

I forget what the % was, or maybe it was a $ total, but the point was that you can't give that much money to a non QB and expect to win. The article might have been in reference to the Rams and Donald's new deal (spent some time searching for it but couldn't find it).

Anyway, the positions that make the most $ are
1. QB
2. Edge Rusher
3. WR
4. Interior DL
5. Left Tackle

(This is from a BSPN article from March, so might have changed. List is ordered by highest paid player at that position).

So, if you accept the theory "You can't pay non QBs a high % of the salary cap and expect to build a team around them", then Ken's theory is correct that since WR is the third highest paid position, it doesn't make sense to pay WR (or edge rusher; see Jones, Chandler).

However, like I said, there are plenty of players that were paid above that cutoff of high percentage of the cap and got to the Super Bowl, but lost to the Patriots. So there are some confounding factors in this analysis.

 

[Ice_Ice_Brady]

He almost made it moot, unless he's running around cutting out peoples' tongues.

Bwahahahahaha!!!!