James Conner having a career year for TDs

Well they got Turner to replace DeCastro, that's probably an upgrade.

 

No, no it isn’t.

 

You obviously didn't watch DeCastro last season, he didn't get any push.

 

Conner’s running wasn’t really the issue. It’s his health. He can’t handle a consistent workload.

 

Nope. Conner is the goal line carry RB on an excellent offensive team. He's gonna get his stats and he can have them. Najee Harris has played 7 games and is already 10 times the player Conner is.

 

I understand where you're coming from, and don't disagree, but I think the contract limit is more to establish a baseline value at which players lost or signed trigger the compensatory formula. $1.75MM is a low baseline in NFL dollars - if not for COVID one could argue Connor's contract may well have met it. Pandemic aside, one of the reasons for a limit is to cap the amount of signings that must be factored into the formula.

To your point - and to the illogical one Benny is trying to chide the Steelers over by simply focusing on a single RB stat - player performance should be the driving factor. But trying to establish an agreed-upon equation for exactly what that value is can quickly become contentious (and is likely the reason you can't find what the NFL actually uses). Placing a cap eliminates some static from the yearly computations for each team while also providing a somewhat tangible floor to the value for which a team will be compensated for losing.

That it's not a perfect system shouldn't be too surprising. Look at what the league went through to define what a catch looks like.