Wash Times- A man with a plan: Redskins’ Eric Schaffer serves valuable role as contract negotiator

[aREDSKIN]

A good read here......

 

 

A party was brimming at Redskins Park and there was hardly time for Eric Schaffer to revel in it, even though he was the driving force behind the excitement that was pulsating through the team’s building past 8 p.m. on a Friday night in late April.

Schaffer had just spent the last several hours in his office negotiating with agent Ryan Williams, fending off charging teams and hammering away at the framework of the five-year, $75 million contract that would ultimately lead Josh Norman to the Washington Redskins.

 

 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/6/eric-schaffer-redskins-contract-josh-norman/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

[RedBeast]

A perfect triangle...GMSM, JayG, Schaffer. Another thing we haven't seen in awhile...a balanced front office and staff, in unison.

[SonnyandSam]

Surprised not more comments in this thread. Arguably, Schaffer is the second most valuable man in the organization after McCloughan. He has managed the cap quite well despite poor decisions made by Snyder and the front office and the money Mara stole from us. Sounds like he is now playing a greater role in planning and orchestrating the pursuit of free agents and keeping our best players around. He plays an invaluable role and does it quite well. Nice to see others around the league respect him, including player agents.

[Conn]

Good article. The reason he doesn't get more credit is because he's not making decisions, he's enabling them. And he's perhaps the best enabler in the business, which helps exaggerate the good or bad about the decision makers in charge at the time. He's excellent at getting the players they want signed and under the cap, and then as we've seen, perception is tied to how things go on the field from there. So while he's ultimately not getting the credit he should, he's also not getting saddled with the blame from bad moves he doesn't deserve...I'm sure a guy in his position can appreciate that.

[pjfootballer]

Finally got to read it last night. He's a magician with the salary cap. Glad all three are on the same page and it seems like a well oiled machine now.

[Cooooley47]

The Skins finally have a top tier management system in place and I just hope they are able to keep this in place for many years.  Snyder has taken a lot of bashing from fans and media over the years, deservidly so, but I always appreciated his desire to win.  One of the main reasons I stopped following the O's was that Peter Angelos just doesnt seem to give a damn. 

 

I am still very worried though.  If Snyder some how screws this up, it will be tough to believe he will ever get it.  

[CharlesCC2]

A perfect triangle...GMSM, JayG, Schaffer. Another thing we haven't seen in awhile...a balanced front office and staff, in unison.

 

Yep.  It's hard not to be excited reading stuff like this:

 

“The three prongs, to me, of a front office have to be in lockstep or you’re screwed up,” Schaffer said. “It has to be the scouting and the personnel, the coaching, and it has to be the money and the cap. If those areas are not exactly on the same page, you can make a major mistake.”

Schaffer, 42, said that lesson is the greatest one he’s learned since joining the Redskins, one gleaned from missteps such as Adam Archuleta’s six-year, $30 million contract in 2006 and Albert Haynesworth’s seven-year, $100 million megadeal in 2009.

“[Those contracts] were a great example of a situation of coaching, personnel and money not getting together,” Schaffer said. “Every team makes mistakes. Your best chance is when you’re together.”

That alignment exists now, which why the Redskins were comfortable pursuing Norman in April despite a seeming disregard for McCloughan’s overall plan. Washington had approximately $12 million in salary cap space before it signed Norman, whose deal eventually called for a $15 million signing bonus, $37 million guaranteed in his first two seasons, a first-year salary cap hit of $8 million and a charge of $20 million in 2017.

The size of that second-year cap hit isn’t a concern to Schaffer, who is confident it still fits into the puzzle of the overall roster composition. His belief: A successful team has approximately half of its roster signed to rookie contracts to supplement premium-priced established players, and the goal should be to have enough cap space to extend home-grown players when their rookie deals expire.

It’s a philosophy that echoes McCloughan‘s. The Redskins‘ general manager, regarded among his peers as a shrewd evaluator of talent, believes strongly in building from within the draft. That has set the foundation for a more balanced roster and is a stark contrast from the veteran-heavy teams that challenged Schaffer and strained the Redskins‘ salary cap in previous years.

[TSO]

I always get contradictory feelings when reading stuff like this.

On one hand, it's awesome we're finally at a point where we have a properly structured FO. It's incredible just how quickly things turned around as soon as that happened.

On the other hand, it's extremely frustrating to witness this success while knowing that this is something that should've been done a long, long time ago.

What would've Joe Gibbs accomplished with this type of structure? What other coaching hires would've went differently? Heck, how many coaching hires would've been avoided due to being unnecessary? How many elite players would we have had all these years?

My biggest criticism of Dan Snyder has been his hiring process (or lack thereof really). Snyder had Vinny here forever for God's sake. That's really where Snyder needs to be involved in a major way, and what he needs to excel at as owner. Macro, not micro.

It's silly to think he shouldn't be involved at all, but if his macro hiring process is top notch he won't need to be - and shouldn't be - involved in the actual decision-making of the people hired to fulfill said roles. In fact, his past involvement in "micro" decisions was only a testament to his failure as owner to have the right hiring process. If he couldn't trust whom he hired, or allowed to be hired, to fulfill their specific roles and had to force things or insert himself, that suffices as enough proof of his own failures there.

Perhaps the best example of this was the Zorn hire and tenure. I won't got into all the details, but there's a litany of evidence in that whole episode. In the end, he actually stated that Vinny shouldn't have allowed him to make such a hire. Wow.

So it's not simply the structure that's important. It's the structure and the hiring process, the latter being more significant. The ability to find the right people for those specific roles in said structure.

We were extremely fortunate someone who might arguably be the best talent evaluator in the NFL like Scot was out there.

Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely pleased by where we're at and I'm mostly looking forward... it's just hard to ignore how long this took and how much damage we could've easily avoided.

At this point, I believe Dan understands what Schaffer is saying now about the proper structure. The question remains, however, does Dan totally understand that for the organization to always be in the best position for success he needs to have a great hiring process to maintain this proper structure?

Right now it seems Allen is the guy in charge of the hiring process, and I'm fine with that. I think he's solid in that role, though there is the question of whether or not Allen just got lucky that Scot was out there and he had no other legit options for a true GM.

Either way, Dan has to be the guy, in the end, who excels at this because he's above Allen himself. If Allen starts to stink it up, does Dan know how to replace him properly? Or can he assume Allen's role himself?

If we are to maintain this organizational integrity for as long as Dan is the owner, those questions have to be answered in the affirmative.

I hope and pray that's the case now. I'd love to find out that they have this elaborate system in place tracking both experienced as well as up and coming scouts, coaches, execs, etc... to where any of our current occupants of top titles can be replaced with someone equally as good or better, and that Snyder is himself fully aware of it so that he could excel at finding the right people.

[chipwhich]

IDK, he has been with us 13 years and has been involved in a lot of fiasco's here.  We get a real GM and now his role is valuable?  He presided over Haynesworth?  Arch Deluxe?  Glad he is such a great contract negotiator.  He has to take some blame in the loss of cap space?

 

I am thankful we have Scot.  And we are still at 1 year of winning.  I will hold off on praise for someone who has been part of a broken system whose star shines because he negotiates outrageous deals with big fish free agents who signed because the deals were outrageous.  Kudos?  We are doing what we are doing because of Scot.

[TSO]

IDK, he has been with us 13 years and has been involved in a lot of fiasco's here. We get a real GM and now his role is valuable? He presided over Haynesworth? Arch Deluxe? Glad he is such a great contract negotiator. He has to take some blame in the loss of cap space?

I am thankful we have Scot. And we are still at 1 year of winning. I will hold off on praise for someone who has been part of a broken system whose star shines because he negotiates outrageous deals with big fish free agents who signed because the deals were outrageous. Kudos? We are doing what we are doing because of Scot.

I don't know, brother, it seems like his role is limited to assigning the value on players the decision makers want. If I'm interpreting this right he's got nothing to do with actually choosing the players.

Which would mean it's not his fault Gregg wanted Archuleta badly and could override the scouts on that, or that Dan/Vinny wanted Haynesworth at any cost and that they were the ultimate decision makers at that point.

He simply made it work. That's what he's talking about in the article when he mentions the necessary synergy between personnel/scouting, coaching staff, and cap.

Are you arguing that he should've fought them on it? That'd mean he's more than just a cap/contract guy, which may be the case considering Gibbs' comments about him being "...bold enough to give you his real opinion" or how Scot said he wears many hats. I just get the sense that his position is limited to the cap/contracts and that anything else he's involved in he doesn't have any real power

And, if that's the case, then he's great at his role and should be commended.

Our problem has been that the other, more important, Front Office positions haven't been filled with people who are actually as good at those roles as Schaffer is at his. Had that been the case, and I believe it is now, we'd likely already be a perennial contender.

[LD0506]

My biggest concern is complacency, now that things finally seem to be working like a pro outfit should does TheDan feel like he's "got it" and just let the weeds grow again? Or has he truly learned something tangible from the years of misery he put us through? So far Scot has been crushing it, not just in GM duties but it attitudes and structural changes, but the eventual butting of the heads comes (and we know it will sooner or later) what will our owner bring to it that he didn't have before? Actual humility? That's a lot to ask.

 

I am thrilled with what we've seen so far but we are one turbulent offseason from going back in the ****ter if the principals involved don't gain wisdom instead of just experience. Schaffer himself is an object lesson in how competent personnel can be rendered irrelevant if the structure doesn't function.  How genuinely strong are we? There's no way to be sure yet, you always figure the rehab worked until the next rock gets fired up.

[Wyvern]

Schaffer seems like a solid part of the Skins Front office, managing the cap and the money during some turbulent times. Consider some of the conditions the Shaffer had to cope with:

-- An activist owner (at least for many of the early years) whose involvement has not always been helpful;

-- Either no official GM position or a GM role being handled by someone of dubious proficiency (Cerrato);

-- The occasional "executive consultantant" who was taken onboard had the owner's ear;

-- A regular coaching carousel -- and oftentimes presiding over holdover coaching staffs not aligned to the new coach's ways of doing things;

-- Constant changes of the team offensive schemes/philosophy, as well its defensive schemes/philosophy;

-- A less than effective/ less than assertive scouting department.

Most important of the problems that Schaffer has to contend with ... was the long time Skins owner/FO mentality of "The Future is Now" -- i.e., not building through the draft, and instead opting for flashy trades, pricey free agent signings, and/or trading away picks to move up in the draft, etc. This was exacerbated by the owner's need to fill his stadium even though his teams weren't performing well -- which resulted in decisions to have "flashy" new acquisitions -- like Haynesworth, McNabb, Griffin, etc...who could be effectively marketed to bring in the fan base.

Consequently, Schaffer had to work around roster-payrolls marbled with dead money, over-priced aging veterans (who weren't currently effective but had long-term guaranteed contracts), a very small pool of rookie contracts, and usually very little cap-room available without restructuring existing contracts. And on top of all that, Schaffer STILL would have to try to accomodate the owner's annual burning desire to bring onboard the newest, flashiest free agents he deemed necessary to keep the fans coming to his games.

As the FO office and coaching situation have gotten more settled, and the rebuild strategy became more pragmatic and football-professional oriented and not so heavily oriented to short-run and marketing needs --- we're starting to see what Schaffer can do.

It's early, but things have really been looking up with the current Skins FO/ scouting/coaching situation. I think this is an environment where someone with Schaffer's experience will really start to shine. But time will tell.

[Est.1974]

IDK, he has been with us 13 years and has been involved in a lot of fiasco's here.  We get a real GM and now his role is valuable?  He presided over Haynesworth?  Arch Deluxe?  Glad he is such a great contract negotiator.  He has to take some blame in the loss of cap space?

I dare say he does as he's told, get it done. So I guess his role always has been valuable even when we made some awful signings. His job was to sort the numbers. If Fat Al was getting 100mil this guy had to make it fit. So he's always done a great job irrespective of success in free agency or performance on the field.

[Larry]

I'm glad to see it. 

 

I've had the impression for the last few years that "I don't know who, but whoever's been negotiating our contracts seems to have been doing a good job." 

 

I don't see the claims of the Skins overpaying for people.  Something we used to be legendary for. 

 

And heck, seems lately we've has 3-4 players signed to one-year contracts that were like half of what people were projecting. 

 

I've had the feeling, admittedly uninformed, that that part of our FO has been doing things smart for probably the last 5 years.  Well before our new coach or GM. 

[chipwhich]

Our problem has been that the other, more important, Front Office positions haven't been filled with people who are actually as good at those roles as Schaffer is at his. Had that been the case, and I believe it is now, we'd likely already be a perennial contender.

 

While I am on the optimistic view going forward (which hasn't been the case for years), and Schaffer may be phenomenal (although you credit him with the good, you gotta penalize him with the salary cap infraction), I still like 2 see 2 back to back winning years before I go to overboard on the team.  So I hope you are right about Schaffer, I just don't know if I am ready to toot anyone's horn but maybe Scot until we see a few good years.