As the Green Bay Packers are negotiating with head coach Matt LaFleur for what seems to be a rather inevitable extension, I find myself increasingly annoyed by the organization. Not because of a LaFleuer extension, no, I am on board with that. It\u2019s everything surrounding it, which mostly comes down to the Packers being cheap. The Packers are not cheap like how the Cincinnati Bengals are cheap. By all accounts, their front office is well-staffed. The Packers are more than happy to spend cash on the roster. They fully leveraged the end of the Aaron Rodgers era, and they\u2019ve put their money where their mouth is for Jordan Love\u2019s prime. It\u2019s the coaching spend.<\/p>\n
If you allow me to take a trip down my formal training lane, labor costs are going to be well-correlated to labor quality, in the aggregate. This isn\u2019t necessarily true in markets with severe distortions, like the market for professional sports players, where drafts, league minimums or maximums, and collectively bargained nuances wittle away at the typical efficiencies seen in broader labor markets, but the NFL coaching market doesn\u2019t work like that. There\u2019s no salary cap on coaches. There are certainly industry standards for pay, but that\u2019s true in almost every industry. And how does Green Bay approach these industry standards?<\/p>\n
Allegedly not very well. In fact, according to ESPN\u2019s Adam Schefter, the coach spending standards in Green Bay are part of the problem of the negotiation, not just for LaFleur himself, but for what he can spend on his staff.<\/p>\n
They have certain budgets that they want to stay within and certain money allocations they\u2019re used to spending. You know, as an example, the New York Giants are paying Brian Daboll, I don\u2019t know the exact number, but let\u2019s just call it $7 million a year. If they want to go hire John Harbaugh, are they going to pay double or triple that? Yesterday\u2019s prices are not today\u2019s prices. You want to get the best of the best? You\u2019re gonna have to pay for that.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know exactly what Matt makes right now, but if the Packers want to go hire John Harbaugh, they might end up paying close to double in salary. Double.<\/p>\n