The GM's Job is Amazingly Difficult

[NastyNateSoldiers]

On 3/5/2024 at 7:51 PM, Shaw66 said:

I've been thinking about how hard a GM's job is.   The job is almost hopelessly complex, and it requires constant, complex thinking and decision making in an environment where you don't know the answers to many questions. 

 

Think about Beane:

 

Your team has about 70 players during the regular season, when you include guys who are injured or on the practice squad.  Fifteen or twenty or thirty of the players you had at the end of last season are going to leave your team in the next four months.  Your job is to fill the openings with players who, together with the guys who carry over, give your head coach the best opportunity to assemble a great team.  

 

Although 20 or 30 might leave, you don't know today which 20 or 30 that is.  That will depend on decisions they make in free agency, or you make about them.  You don't know which players are going to be available from other teams as the same thing is playing out in their offices.   You have essentially no idea who you'll be able to draft, and you have very little idea of which guys in the draft can help the team in 2024.  

 

You talk to McDermott and Brady, and ask which guys are essential and which are expendable.  Their answer is, "It depends on who you bring in to help fill the spots that will become vacant.  

 

What you do know is if you sign this guy you won't have enough cap room to sign that guy.  And the importance of the positions in your consideration changes as you keep or lose guys.  

 

One guy may be your priority, but you have limits on how much you can spend and how that spending can be structured, and the player may not like the financial package, so you don't even know if you can get your priority guy.   Occasionally, a guy who becomes your priority changes the whole picture for you, sometimes for multiple years.  Giving up picks for Diggs solved a problem but affected the shape of the roster because a first-round pick disappeared.  Signing Von Miller changed the whole picture, because he brought significant cap consequences to the equation going forward.  

 

In that environment, an environment where you're not sure who you're going to lose or who you're going to get, and all of it is limited by how much you have to spend, you have to make decisions.   You have to let some guys walk, extend some guys, rework some deals, all in preparation for when free agency hits.   When free agency starts, you have to start making decisions about players.  Every decision you make, every deal you work, changes what you need and how much you can spend.  Thirty-one other teams are making deals, too, so the players who remain available keep changing, and what they're worth keeps changing as the deals affect the market.  

 

When the draft comes along, you take a break from the free agency puzzle and run a mini-version of the whole problem in your head over three days to acquire 8 or 10 guys, each of whom may or may not perform the way you think they will (after all, you've never seen them against NFL competition).   Then you go back to working deals with other free agents, based on a revised picture of the roster as the result of the draft.  

 

The bottom line is that it's impossible today for Beane or any other GM to have a plan for what the roster will look like on September 1.  It's a huge puzzle the GM has to put together over the next five months, a puzzle where the actual picture of the completed puzzle keeps changing, and the pieces available to complete the puzzle keep changing too.  

 

 

It's amazingly fun as well I would love to have his job.