10 NFL Veterans Who Could Be on the Roster Bubble

Process

For a player to be truly on the roster cut-down hot seat, he has to cost his team a fair amount of money against the salary cap, to avoid causing a large chunk of dead money count against the team if cut, and to have performed poorly in recent years. These three qualities together make a player fairly expendable.

Using Spotrac, I was able to find every NFL player whose salary cap hit for 2016 was $1 million or more, as well as each player with dead money (the amount of their contract that would remain on the team salary cap if they were cut) less than their cap hit.

I then matched up each of those players with their 2015 Net Expected Points (NEP) production to see just how effective they have been. NEP is a metric that lets us take the numbers we get from the box score and shows how that player or team did versus expectation. By adding down-and-distance value to standard box score information, we can see just how much each play and each team as a whole influence the outcome of games. If a running back rushes for five-yards on 3rd-and-2, it means more to the game than it does on 3rd-and-10, and those plays should be valued accordingly. For more info on NEP, check out our glossary.