Bill Belichick: Overspending teams can't sustain success, eventually you pay the bills
Patriots coach Bill Belichick says that big spending sprees in free agency don't lead to sustained success in the NFL.
Belichick said on WEEI that teams can get a one-year boost by giving players contracts with big signing bonuses and small cap hits in the first year, but eventually that money counts against the team's salary cap, and those teams end up having a day of reckoning.
“Temporarily you can, but you can’t sustain it, no,” Belichick said, via MassLive.com. “You can’t sustain the 20 years of success that we sustained by overspending every year without having to eventually pay those bills and play with a lesser team. So I think if you look at the teams that have done that, that’s kinda where some of them ended up. Jacksonville back in ‘14, the Rams are going through it, Tampa is going through it now. So, I’m not saying there’s anything right or wrong with it. It’s just a different way of doing things and there’s the results for doing that.”
Asked why the Patriots are near the bottom of the league in the amount of cash they'll spend on players in 2023, Belichick said that's not relevant. What's relevant is the salary cap, which the Patriots will spend to.
“Cash spending isn’t really that relevant. It’s cap spending,” Belichick said. “So teams that spend a lot of cash one year, probably don’t spend a lot of cash in the next year because you just can’t sustain that. So we’ve had high years, we’ve had low years, but our cap spending has always been high. And that’s the most competitive position you can be in. So that’s really — the cash spending, there’s no cash cap. There’s a salary cap and we spend to the salary cap. That’s what’s important.”
Ultimately, Belichick said, people who focus on any one year's spending are overlooking what really goes into building a roster.
"You can’t look at it in a Polaroid snapshot," Belichick said. "It’s a multi-year process. So you can overspend one year, and then at some point you’re not going to be able to do that.”
