Longtime Bears and Indianapolis Colts personnel guru Bill Tobin once told me, back when free agency was first starting in 1993 and contract amounts were starting to spike up dramatically, that “just because you pay some guy $2 million doesn’t make him a $2 million player.”
The dollar parameters seem almost quaint more than 20 years later. But the perspective is as timely now as it always has been.
Indeed, depending on the individual and the situation, paying “some guy” $2 million (adjusted for inflation to 2014 dollars) can have precisely the opposite effect, making that some-guy a very overpaid second-rate player.