Big Blue View
What will the Giants do with Kayvon Thibodeaux and Evan Neal?
With the NFL regular season now ended and Pro Bowl selections made, it is possible to anticipate an important decision almost every general manager has to make: Whether to exercise the fifth-year option on your first round draft pick(s). The Pro Bowl has never had the “juice” of the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, which at one time was a truly competitive game played for pride between the two leagues which otherwise never met except in the World Series. Now, there isn’t even an actual Pro Bowl game anymore, making it completely meaningless, with one important exception: Fan voting accounts for one-third of the final tally that determines who gets selected. You can know nothing and still vote. You can stuff the ballot box for your brother if he’s an NFL player even if he’s back of the roster and help get him in. It’s the one way in which NFL fans are truly empowered. Never mind flying banners over MetLife Stadium.
What’s amazing about this is that the fans can wind up indirectly affecting NFL player contracts. Before a first-round draftee’s fourth NFL year, his GM has to decide whether to pick up his fifth-year option. A set formula determines the salary of a player whose option is picked up. It depends in part on playing time, which introduces its own perverse bias: An OK player on a bad team who starts because his team has no one better gets more if his option is picked up than a better player on a good team who sees the field less because the roster is stacked at his position. The big thing, though, is that your option is higher if you’ve made a Pro Bowl, and even more so if you’ve made multiple Pro Bowls. So we, the fans, cost our team future cap space if we help get our favorite player voted in. (Note for future reference: It only counts if you make the Pro Bowl on the original selection, so Malik Nabers getting in as an alternate will not count toward his fifth-year option in a couple of years.)
The people at Over The Cap do a great job tracking these things. Here are their fifth-year option projections for the 2022 draft class:
This chart is fascinating because it provides fairly direct evidence that a belief of many fans is nothing more than a myth: “A GM has to hit on his first-round picks.” Giants fans in particular raise this issue about Joe Schoen, who has drafted Kayvon Thibodeaux, Evan Neal, Deonte Banks, and Malik Nabers in the first round since becoming Giants GM. Fans rarely define what a “hit” is; usually it’s a matter of “you know it when you see it.” So based on one season’s work, I think it’s fair to say that Nabers is a “hit,” even if you thought Schoen should have taken J.J. McCarthy. Deonte Banks looked like he was going...
