Your claim was that paying a player more than he is worth is bad, and that the best teams underpay their talent the most. Now you're just manipulating the numbers in a poor attempt to justify a mistaken comment.
I have been absolutely consistent on this. You just don't seem to be able to follow.
The cost of a player is the amount of money that you have to pay to keep him on your team.
If a player signs a four year deal with an $8M signing bonus, and annual salaries of $1M, that deal costs $12M over four years or $3M/year.
It is a bad idea to sign it if the player is only worth $2M/year. It is a good idea to sign it if a player is worth $4M/year.
One second after you pay the signing bonus, the $8M is added to your cap for the next four years. Unless you get the player to return the signing bonus, you can never ever get back that $8M of cap space. From that moment onwards, the deal is worth $1M/year.
If the player is struck by lightning and suffers from reduced mobility that lowers his market value to $1.5M/year, you would not cut him because he is worth more than the $1.5M/year you are paying him.
The cost of a player (for purposes of keeping him on the roster or not) is the amount of ADDITIONAL money that you have to pay him to keep him on your roster.
What makes this argument of yours more ridiculous is that you're using it with the one team that most runs counter to your argument. This team assigns a value and then holds to it. It 'overpays' for the bottom end of its roster at the comparative expense of the upper eschelon players. So, for you to talk about jettisoning a fairly low-end/middle class salary is even more foolish in the context of this particular team.
Earlier in this thread I defined in detail the term "underpay" as I use it. I believe you replied to that post. You are now using a completely different definition of underpay.
When I say "underpay", I mean that we pay less for that player's usable talent than that talent is worth on the FA market.
You appear to be using the term "underpay" to mean that we pay less for a particular roster spot than the league average.
Of course the Patriots put a lot of emphasis on depth. You can't make me say otherwise by changing definitions.
Our success is the result of getting a lot of talent for very little money. (underpaying)
Last year, when we got Caldwell and Gafney for a TOTAL of $1.32M, Caldwell was on the happy side of the value/benefit equation.
This year Caldwell costs twice as much as last year, and probably has the same amount of talent.
Sometimes when you double the price on a good deal, it becomes a bad deal. I believe that Caldwell is an example of this.
