After rookie Russell Wilson led the Seattle Seahawks past the Robert Griffin III led-Redskins, the question comes to mind: Should the Redskins have picked Wilson instead of RG3? After all, the Redskins had to give up high draft picks to get Griffin, who ended the season with a nagging knee injury. Wilson, a former NC State quarterback, was chosen in the third round and is still in the playoffs.
Against the Redskins, Wilson completed 15 of 26 passes for 187 yards and ran eight times for 67 more while Griffin struggled after aggravating the knee injury.
While Griffin has brought back excitement to Washington, he is a career-ending injury away from setting the Redskins back years.
An economics editor based in DC, Neil Irwin, says that Wilson is a more valuable quarterback than Griffin.
He wrote, “The cost of a player is not just what he is paid, but what was given up to hire him. Opportunity cost matters. And Griffin did not just fall into the Redskins’ lap. The team traded not merely its own 2012 first-round draft pick to get him, but its 2012 second-round pick and first-round picks in 2013 and 2014. In other words, three extra opportunities to gain very good players at a below-market price were handed over to the St. Louis Rams in order to get Griffin.
“So on one hand, Griffin offers surplus value of around $8 million a year for as long as he stays healthy and remains on his rookie contract. But you also have to subtract the surplus value that the team would have gained from those three other players. As Kevin Meers wrote at the Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective, Griffin will need to have performance on par with sure-fire Hall of Famer Tom Brady, winner of three Super Bowls, to be worth what the Redskins traded away for him.
“Contrast that with the winning quarterback in Sunday’s game. Russell Wilson, also a rookie, was the eighth highest performing quarterback this season, which would make him worth something like Ben Roethlisberger’s $9.9 million. Instead, as a third-round draft pick, Wilson cost the Seahawks only $545,0000. That $9.4 million in surplus value is not only higher than Griffin’s, but the Seahawks didn’t have to trade anything away to get him, so you don’t have to subtract any opportunity cost.
“For much of the Daniel Snyder era, the Redskins have premised their team building strategy around big, flashy free agent signings. There was at least an interesting case to be made then, at a time that top draft picks were overpaid given the uncertainty around their performance that it was a good strategy. Given the economics of the NFL, the new collective bargaining agreement made draft picks dramatically more valuable. That makes the decision to trade so many of them away seem foolhardy, even as good as Griffin has been.
“To become a perennial playoff team like the Patriots, Steelers, Packers, or Ravens, the Redskins will need to find more players who give consistently more performance than their pay would suggest—and it will be hard to get those players without any first-round draft picks. Instead, to strengthen its weak secondary and replace aging stars, Snyder and his crew will have to fire up the jet to hit the free agent market and pay established players their full market value, which doesn’t really solve anything, as it is not a place that bargains are easily found.”