Blogging The Boys
Every August, NFL fans ask the same question:
“Did the best players make the 53-man roster?”
It’s a perfectly reasonable question. It’s also the wrong one.
Because the job of an NFL front office isn’t to reward the best performances from training camp or the preseason. Its job is to assemble the roster that gives the organization the greatest chance to succeed – not just this season, but over the next three or four years.
In management, there’s a simple framework that captures this dilemma: the Performance–Potential-Matrix, better known as the 9-Box Grid. Organizations evaluate employees on two separate dimensions:
The famous 9-box grid looks like this:
body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table { border: 1px solid #000 !important; border-collapse: collapse !important; } body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th { padding: 4px 6px !important; } Low PotentialMedium PotentialHigh PotentialHigh PerformanceExpert
High performer
Limited upsideKey Contributor
Strong performer
Still developingFuture Leader
High performer
High potentialMedium PerformanceSteady ContributorCore EmployeeEmerging TalentLow PerformancePoor FitNeeds DevelopmentHigh-Risk Bet
High upsideThe key insight is that high performers aren’t automatically high potentials, and vice versa. Great organizations try to identify both.
NFL roster construction is not fundamentally different.
Every player fighting for one of the final roster spots sits somewhere on that same matrix. A veteran may have consistently demonstrated he can execute his assignments on gameday. A rookie may be less reliable today but possess physical traits that suggest a much higher ceiling.
The challenge isn’t identifying which player performed better in August. The challenge is deciding which player creates more value going forward.
This is where the philosophy behind Moneyball becomes surprisingly relevant. Most people remember Moneyball as the story of baseball’s statistical revolution – or an odd film about baseball with Brad Pitt. But the real lesson wasn’t about replacing scouts with spreadsheets. It was about understanding that observed performance isn’t the same thing as underlying talent – and that statistics are evidence about a player but not the player himself.
Billy Beane wasn’t asking who had the better season, he was asking why a particular player had a better season. Was it due to a repeatable skill? Or was it inflated by noisy information like opponent quality, teammate performance, or simple good fortune?
People often think the idea is about finding obscure, undervalued statistics. But that’s just the tactic. The philosophy goes much deeper and is about estimating the talent, not the performance.
Imagine two hitters in baseball. Player A has a batting average of .340, Player B has a batting average of .285.
A traditional evaluation would hold that Player A is clearly the better player. A better evaluation asks why Player A has the better batting average.
