There was a time as kids where you could learn an entire roster of players on your favorite team with ease. These guys seemed to stay for years and when you bought the poster of the 1978 Dallas Cowboys and would stare at it and have a familiarity that was hard to mistake. I have a good friend who still can recite the entire roster by heart of a team that played 45 years ago.
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But, the NFL was different back then. Players had no ability to move in free agency and teams pretty much had you on their roster for as long as they wanted. It made for continuity and for the fans to really feel a bond with even the bottom of the roster. But, it doesn’t exist anymore.
Now, teams must move quicker and understand that the big picture is more immediate. This has become far more of a year-to-year proposition with the quest of winning a title should move to the front burner quicker. This is now the way things appear to be with teams “going for it” and understanding that worrying about seven years from now seems silly.
The Philadelphia Eagles almost won two Super Bowls within 60 months with completely different rosters. In February 2018 they beat the Patriots and in 2023, they returned with only five players left on the roster (excluding kicker and deep snapper) in February of 2023 and nearly won the whole thing. So, in the minds of the fans — especially in the future — those two teams will probably be considered linked as “one and the same”, but the reality is that it is more than 90 percent a cast of new characters.
This is why we must have a solid understanding about how a roster is built and how we think of the “four-year conveyor belt of talent” which is an important lesson for any modern-day NFL fan who really wants to dive below fantasy football levels and dig into what makes successful franchises successful in 2023.
Let’s review the concept:
What is the ‘four-year conveyor belt of talent?’
The normal rookie contract in the NFL is a four-year deal. This is true for all rookie contracts that are not first-round picks. Those first-rounders have a fifth-year option that can be activated, but it is basically the NFL’s equivalent of arbitration, which means it is not really a significant discount over where elite players at his position will generally earn.
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Next year, for instance, the Cowboys will have CeeDee Lamb on his fifth-year option of $17.99 million in 2024, which is the Year-5 price for a wide receiver. But the first four years were at a total of $14 million — about $3.5 million per season. As you can see, this is a major decision for a team to “bridge” its player to a long-term extension, because they are officially walking across the bridge from cheap labor to expensive. Very expensive. If you need 53 to 60 players under $224.8 million (the 2023 NFL salary cap), then you had better have a very high number of cheap players if you are going to try to pay your best five players over half of it on their own. It simply has to cause issues at some point and the only solution is having a roster filled with guys on their rookie deals.
Let’s look at why the four-year conveyor belt is so vital.
At present, the Cowboys have eight players who average at least $10 million per year on their deals. That may not sound so bad, but as you can quickly see, that ends up at $130.9 million. More specifically, that’s about 58.2 percent of their entire payroll.
Player | AAV |
|---|---|
$40 million | |
$19.8 million | |
$14 million | |
$13.3 million | |
$12.2 million | |
$11.5 million | |
$10.1 million | |
$10 million | |
$130.9 million |
But, wait, there is more.
As, we mentioned above, the Cowboys have Lamb locked in at $18 million for 2024, which can certainly be used as his entry number of a long-term contract for the next four to six years. Maybe one that will average in the $24 million range, perhaps. OK, then we must also consider what we have been earmarking for Trevon Diggs. Could you get Diggs at around $18 million a year? Maybe? Then what about Micah Parsons? I have no idea what Parsons’ value will be, but it seems to start in the $28 million a year vicinity and perhaps gets above $30 million by the time Nick Bosa gets his deal done to set the standard for Parsons. Do you want to try Tony Pollard at $10 million per? And, of course, the QB will need a new deal soon enough to offer cap flexibility moving forward. Any chance that comes in at less than $45 million?
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You stressed out yet? The Cowboys are now seeing things get very, very top heavy.
Let’s go back to the spreadsheet and imagine what those numbers might end up doing to this list of top salaries:
Player | AAV |
|---|---|
$45 million | |
$30 million | |
$24 million | |
$18 million | |
$14 million | |
$11.5 million | |
$10.1 million | |
$152.6 million | |
Instead of eight players at $130.9 million, you have seven players at $152.6 million. I have good news, though. By then, we believe the cap will have jumped from $224.8 to around $272 million, meaning that you have seven players at 56 percent of your money again. You see the pattern. It suggests you can have about eight to 10 players at 60 percent of your total money and the other 45 rostered players get the remaining 40 percent.
And that 40 percent is the four-year conveyor belt. The entirety of your roster is made up of eight guys with big money and nearly 50 guys with just good money.
Let’s go back to Lamb’s draft to further explain:
That same year, the Cowboys grabbed Tyler Biadasz in Round 4. With Biadasz, they do not have a fifth-year option, so instead he is an unrestricted free agent already. But they did get his four years of labor for less than $3.8 million — an average of just under $950,000 for all four seasons. This is how teams have to fill their spots for the rank-and-file soldiers they need below the top eight to 10 earners on their roster. Teams get four years of cheap labor and that is how they fill the roster because they can only give out a handful or two of big contracts and still field a team.
Even though we think a football team is a long-term venture where guys spend a decade here, the reality is that most NFL players — this is true everywhere — spend four years or less in their locale. Then their contract expires and either they are special players or they are replaced with new cheap labor who will perform on that Biadasz-level rookie deal all over again.
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Let me demonstrate with this handy and updated Cowboys roster sheet that I periodically share with you. Here is the team as it is built. I am obviously doing this for the Cowboys, but I could do it for anyone. Notice the last four years: 2020-2023: 50 players are current members of the four-year cycle. There are 12 are veterans who predate that. Half of those 12 are what we call “big earners” of $10 million or more per year and the other six are guys who have agreed to lesser deals to stay or are special teams or backups like CJ Goodwin and Cooper Rush. Let’s focus on the four year conveyor belt. Eighty-one percent of the players we consider a part of this roster (sorry, training camp bodies don’t make this sheet until they make the team) are part of this four-year cycle. You will find that everywhere in the league.
For symmetry reasons, it works better that Mike McCarthy started in 2020, because this is his fourth year, so now we would say he has “his guys” after this cycle has completely run through. Every player who is on this roster has been signed off and approved by him or his staff.
But, for the sake of this actual exercise, I like to point out how fast it all happens. That 2019 rookie class is not old at all, but it is already gone unless the Cowboys decided to extend any of them. And, as you probably know, the deals to keep Pollard and Donovan Wilson are nice, but certainly not enough to move the needle too far across the league. Otherwise, every 2019 draftee has either been jettisoned when their contract expired or well before it did. All in all, it was a very poor draft year which was originally defended by the trade for Amari Cooper, but then after his trade for pretty much nothing, it was made to look even worse.
Yet, now, 2019 is not part of the four-year cycle. Once the 2022 season ended, it turned over to 2020-2023. That means that as we speak, the 2020 draft class is being reviewed carefully behind closed doors.
Lamb is locked in for his fifth year and the Cowboys may be trying to get that one done quickly — and it will be very expensive. But, the other three deals from this class are all very interesting if we all agree that Neville Gallimore and Sean McKeon are not decisions.
Trevon Diggs: Surely you want to keep him, but with top corners making between $18 million and $21 million per season for four to five years, how high are you willing to go? He is an UFA next season and franchising a cornerback is so expensive that it almost makes no sense. I think this also will come to a head in July as Diggs seems a candidate for a “Hold In” for this camp, not that I want to give him any ideas.
Tyler Biadasz: He is a great example of a guy who is a league average starter at center. He is not a weakness, but he also isn’t really a strength. He seems mentally solid and perhaps an improving player, but are you going to make him a priority? What is a fair price at that position? He seems like the type of guy you would love to get on a three-year, $18 million-type deal at a $6 million AAV, but any more than that and you might just draft his successor.
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Terence Steele: This one is another deal that is potentially a high-end situation. Dallas has paid Steele almost nothing in three years and yet he has been a very solid performer. Almost like Biadasz, the Cowboys have spent so much time developing him and riding out his good and bad and his play in 2022 was significantly better than 2020. That is what it is all about. But, of course, to extend him will be quite expensive as right tackles are coming in at more than $15 million per season. Someone will give it to him. Will it be Dallas?
The good news is that 2020 was great for finding key pieces. The bad news is that now they have done all the cheap labor they are likely to do and if you want to keep them, it is going to cost and we know what that means to the budget.
Once they get that settled, it will be time to move on to the 2021 class by next January. You know, the Micah Parsons class. As you can tell, with the four-year conveyor belt, they don’t stay kids for long.
(Top photo of CeeDee Lamb: Sam Hodde / Getty Images)