SmashMouth

Higher is almost always better when it comes to the draft.

No one wants to be in the middle of the pack. The only teams completely satisfied with their picks are the ones at the very top and the team that won the Super Bowl. Everyone else probably wishes they were somewhere else in the order.

The New Orleans Saints probably feel the same way. What picking at 11 means is they’re likely too far away to think about getting someone like Texas A&M pass rusher Myles Garrett, who would alleviate many of the issues New Orleans needs to solve on defense, but high enough to still get a good player.

But there might be one reason the Saints are happy with picking 11th instead of, say, ninth or 10th: It will cost less money. And not just in the sense that the 10th pick will likely make more than $200,000 than whoever is picked 11th in 2017. No, there should be significant savings, down the road, when New Orleans goes to pick up the fifth-year (team) option on the player it drafts this year, for the 2021 season.




As Jason Fitzgerald and Vijay Natarajan wrote in the book “Crunching Numbers: An Inside Look at the Salary Cap and Negotiating Player Contracts,” this puts New Orleans in a unique position.

For players selected in the first 10 spots, their fifth-year option is equal to whatever the transition tag tender is in place during the fourth year of the player’s contract. That means the option is worth the average of the top 10 salaries at the player’s position.

For the rest of the teams picking 11-32, the fifth-year option is calculated using the average of the third through 25th salaries at the player’s position. That can lead to significant (cap and cash) savings.

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