Kirk Cousins, the Vikings, and the Dynasties of Mediocrity

The 2020 and 2021 NFL seasons brought us some truly great storylines.

First, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a team with the lowest winning percentage in the history of the NFL, a team that had never won back-to-back division titles and had not made the playoffs since 2007, acquired the best player in league history and won the Super Bowl from the five seed before making the playoffs again in 2021 by winning the AFC South and earning the conference’s two seed.

Then the Los Angeles Rams, five years removed from St. Louis, acquired longtime losing quarterback Matthew Stafford (along with several other stars) in an effort to secure the franchise’s second Super Bowl victory. And they did, this time, from the conference’s fourth seed.

The method for winning in the NFL used to be simple. Since the 2011 collective bargaining agreement (CBA), the decision tree is either (a) already have an elite quarterback and do your best to build around him with limited resources, hoping he can overcome roster-level deficiencies with brilliant play, or (b) draft a quarterback and use the bounty from his cheap rookie deal to build a roster that can mask his deficiencies.

The Bucs and the Rams, fresh off the second approach with Jameis Winston and Jared Goff, respectively, upended the approach by putting a veteran quarterback on a ready-made roster. They were not the first to do so, as the 2012 Broncos also had success with this method, though they did acquire Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning.

It doesn't always go well, though. The 2018 Minnesota Vikings sent their franchise in a tailspin by asking Kirk Cousins to take them over the hump, and you can go back to the 2001 Baltimore Ravens and Elvis Grbac to see that there’s certainly a threshold a quarterback needs to meet for it to work.

Last offseason, I wrote about transition probabilities. I bucketed NFL teams into four categories — poor, below average, above average and elite — based upon regular-season-ending marks using our PFF Elo rating system.

A “poor” team is four points worse than the average team on a neutral field. A “below-average” team is between zero and four points worse than the average team on a neutral field. An “above-average” team is between zero and four points better. An “elite” team is four or more points better than the average team on a neutral field.

Below is a plot of the amount of time spent below and above-average since the 2011 CBA, which largely checks out with intuition:



Notice here that the narratives associated with the Tampa Bay Bucs are true: they’ve spent a lot of time in the lower tiers of the league, but Tom Brady has changed all of that. Same for Josh Allen in Buffalo.

Derek Carr, the Raiders quarterback since 2014, has largely not been able to. The Cleveland Browns are hoping that Deshaun Watson — who still faces 22 active civil suits accusing him of sexual assault and sexual misconduct — can get them out from where they’ve been since 2011.

Below is a plot of the amount of time spent poor and elite since the 2011 CBA, which also largely checks out with intuition:



This is much like the previous graph, but it highlights bouncing between the extremes.

The San Francisco 49ers, who have either made the NFC Championship Game or lost 10 or more games each season since the 2011 CBA, are well into the interior of this graph, as are teams like the Bucs and Rams, whose fortunes turned as described above.

The teams spending more than 25% of the time in the elite category are the 49ers and many teams with Hall of Fame quarterbacks in Peyton Manning, Russell Wilson, Drew Brees, Patrick Mahomes, Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady.

One thing we learned in the previous study of this phenomenon — which is highlighted in this graph, as well — is that truly elite play is stickier than truly poor play. This is born out in the Markov Matrix transition probabilities...

SO WHAT?

Similar to our initial article, this research suggests that, due to the football-related dynamics described above (elite coaching, elite quarterback play), being elite in the NFL is both difficult to achieve and (relative to the other categories) hard to shake. There is a pretty stable basin of teams that will be championship-level from year to year, and the formula is pretty clear.

The spoils of being an above-average team are not that high after you adjust for its transience, as you’re more likely to be classified as “poor” in one season (and equally likely in two seasons) than you are to be classified as elite.

In fact, an above-average team is just five percentage points more likely to be elite in two years than a poor team is. The 2011 CBA, most specifically the rookie wage scale, has given bad teams instruments to compete with elite teams via the ability to move cheaply from young quarterback to young quarterback. Actively forgoing those instruments appears to be -EV.

Thus, the actionable item here is that many of the instruments that teams are using this time of year to maintain an above-average level of competence — restructuring contracts, void years, mid-level free agents, etc. — are very likely in vain and are underestimating the likelihood that a complete rebuild will work while overestimating their chances of staying above-average or better.

The acquisitions of Brady and Stafford, and the successes that came from them, are very likely one-off situations that won’t apply to most teams, with the Broncos and Wilson on trial come 2022. However, given the stickiness of being elite, the bounty bestowed upon such an outcome is better than simply shooting for competence.