To be able to judge whether the Panthers can find someone better for that $7.25m number, we’ll have to work out how good Kalil actually is.
This something that is hard to do in any single convincing way, but hopefully this is something that can be assessed in the aggregate. Let’s start with Pro Football Reference‘s approximate value statistic. In five of his seven seasons in the NFL, Kalil played all 16 games, and in those seasons Kalil recorded AV’s of 10, 8, 7, 9 and 9 – despite playing through injuries for at least one of those seasons. 23 offensive tackles had an AV of nine or more last season, including the Panthers’ own Taylor Moton with an AV of 10, with 14 of those 23 playing left tackle – remember these 14 for later.
What this means, in short, is that Matt Kalil is a mediocre left tackle when healthy.
Of course, it is easy to dismiss the AV stat, it is only one organization’s idea of value and as such is going to be prone to biases and inaccuracy. So what does Pro Football Focus think about Kalil? Well, in 2017, PFF had him ranked as their 53rd best offensive tackle – that’s not good – but his grades improved significantly over the course of the season; it is worth noting that he was coming off offseason surgery and for the second half of the season, he received a pass blocking grade of 83.4. For context, only Terron Armstead and David Bakhtiari received higher season grades than that at left tackle last season. I’m not trying to convince you that Kalil is an elite left tackle and worth the money he’s being paid – he’s not – but what these numbers strongly suggest is that he is at least mediocre.
Overpaid, but mediocre.
Now we have an even more direct question we can ask in order to work out whether cutting Matt Kalil makes sense. Can you find a mediocre left tackle for $7.25m?
One option that has been discussed for doing this involves moving Taylor Moton to left tackle and either resigning Daryl Williams or getting a free agent to come and play right tackle. One thing that can be said with almost certainty is that, while a top 10 right tackle last season, Moton probably wouldn’t be a top 10 left tackle – given that he played on the right side in college as well, there would likely be some adjustment pains. So one of the cruxes of this plan for next season is moving a player who was borderline elite on one side to a position he’s unfamiliar with and replacing him with someone who missed 15.5 games with a severe knee injury.
So the next big question is how good a right tackle they’d be replacing Moton with – even though we’ve avoided it to this point, we now need to talk about Daryl Williams – Williams, Moton and Kalil are all inextricably linked this offseason.
Daryl Williams is a former second team All-Pro and his 2017 AV would have him ranked as the seventh-best tackle in the NFL in 2018, but those numbers may be a bit skewed – I’m not suggesting he’s terrible, but Mike Shula actively designed plays to limit the impact of his weaknesses. After all, there is a reason why Ed Dickson was used as an additional tackle with some frequency in 2017 – and always on the right side of the offensive line. As a run blocker he is genuinely quite good, but as a pass protector he is somebody you need to hide – while the Panthers were very good at that in 2017, it took a toll in other areas. This isn’t a piece about Williams, but the following play is a good example of where his limitations lie:
This play shows both Williams’ issues and how far the Panthers went to limit his exposure in obvious passing situations. Facing a four-man rush, they keep Dickson in to block the edge rusher and leave Williams and Silatolu to block the tackle while Kalil works solo on the other edge rusher. Williams doesn’t get his pad level low enough and rather than bending with his legs, he bends with his back – so when the tackle works off the initial hand move, he is unable to recover. Kalil, by comparison, does a good job of not giving the edge rusher an inside line and then, when his slide breaks down, does a good job of working the rusher wide which allows Cam to step up into the pocket.
Here’s the key: I don’t really think there is much difference between Kalil and Williams; if the Panthers were able to replace Kalil with Williams – or another tackle – and make a significant cap savings in doing so, that would be one thing – but of the fourteen left tackles that had the AV of nine or higher we spoke about earlier, three are still on their rookie contract and the average salary of the other eleven players last season was $13.5m with five of the eleven earning over $15m – the smallest cap hit of those tackles was $8.4m. The Browns just gave Greg Robinson, whose highest AV since being the second overall pick in 2014 was six in 2015 – a season that was coincidentally his only season with 16 starts, a one-year deal worth as much as $9m – that certainly seems like a market Williams will want to test.
In short, even mediocre left tackles are very expensive.
It isn’t as if right tackles come cheap either – the only right tackle with an AV of 9 or better last season to have a salary under $7m for this season is Demar Dotson. Unless the Panthers have managed to identify some hidden gem in free agency or expect to come out of the draft with a starting tackle from day one, they are likely not going to be able to save much money – if any – by moving on from Matt Kalil in 2019, and unless they think that Taylor Moton at left tackle and Daryl Williams at right tackle is a significantly better combination than Kalil and Moton – which I don’t – there isn’t much, if any, value gained in replacing Kalil with Williams.
The Panthers need to invest heavily on the offensive line in the coming years, but this is something that should be best left to the draft – unlike almost every position but quarterback, teams do not tend to rotate offensive linemen, so the players who hit free agency either come with significant questions, aren’t that good or are going to get paid a lot of money. There aren’t many hidden gems on the offensive line free agent market. If the Panthers want to solve their offensive line problem they need to be willing to draft offensive linemen early and often, rather than repeating the cycle of overpaying mediocre free agents and turning to career backups to plug gaps.
At it’s core, this is an issue about sunk costs – Dave Gettleman and the Panthers gave Kalil a contract he didn’t really deserve and some now feel that they would be better to move on, regardless of whether that actually solves the problem. Should the Panthers be planning to allow them to move on from Kalil in 2020? Yes. Should they go into training camp expecting him to start? Not necessarily. But should they release Kalil without a clear idea of why that makes them better in 2019? No.
This debate shouldn’t be about whether Kalil is worth his salary, but rather whether he is worth the $7.25m they will save by cutting him – and who the starting tackles will be next year will be if he’s gone.
