he had like a 3 year run of atrocious drafts. that’s never been his strength but he’s a master of the cap and if the eagles are in a position to be a landing spot for veterans looking for a chance to win on a short deal he’s been great at using that to fill the gaps in the roster. also made some really good trades. his path has been crazy too. at one point he lost a power struggle with Chip Kelly and kept his job but what removed from any football ops. then Kelly left and he got control back and has been much better since.
Master of the cap always seems like such a silly compliment. All these teams should have a quant or two that know the insides and outs of it. It’s not like Howie is crunching the numbers himself.
he literally got his start with the team as one of those quants and was so good at it he just kept rising. I would assume he still works very closely at it. and I don't think you can assume every team is maximizing their cap. some are certainly better than others.
there's also more to cap management than just number crunching contracts, you have to take how GMs' allocate their cap dollars to the 53 man roster howie built the best and deepest roster in the league last yr adding Brown, Reddick, Bradberry and CJGJ because he allocated like less than 5% of his cap to the RB/LB/S rooms meanwhile the Giants lost Bradberry in part to how much money they had tied up in cap space to RB and LB
weird how the bills, ravens, cowboys, bears, chargers, etc weren’t able to do the same thing while their QBs had minuscule cap hits
Those teams except for the Bears were actually able to build good/great rosters until the point where they had to pay their QB. This is similar to when the Seahawks had Russell Wilson on a rookie contract, when the 9ers had Kaepernick on a rookie contract. It’s easier to build a great team when you don’t have 1 player tying up 30-40% of the salary cap.