Offseason time means the chance to analyze an abundance of variables and factors that we normally don't have the luxury of focusing on during the regular season grind.

Today we'll be discussing what the last nine years tell us about how a team's QB cap hit percentage is correlated with success.

The sample will consist of every team's highest-paid QB from 2011-2019. This is because 2011 marked the first season of the current rookie wage scale. The previous system of having a pool of money to pay rookies was becoming an issue due to holdouts and massive contracts for players who hadn't even played a snap yet. For example, the Rams gave Sam Bradford a five-year, $78 million contract with $50 million guaranteed upon drafting him with the No. 1 overall pick of the 2010 draft. Special thanks to Overthecap.com for all contract data.

Now QBs aren't paid like superstars until playing at least four years in the league. This has led to a number of teams embracing this window of not having to devote a significant amount of cap space to the QB position. The Seahawks and Chiefs have stood out as the era's most-successful franchises at building around their respective rookies under center.

Of course, we've also seen teams like the Rams and Raiders have some early success with their respective QBs on rookie contracts ... only for things to go south once they were forced to pay that player as a high-level veteran.

The NFL has a mix of philosophies when it comes to how to approach the QB position. Overall, the correlation between salary cap hit and playoff appearances has been a fairly-solid +0.39, meaning that teams that have spent more money on the QB position have enjoyed more playoff success over the years.

The general look of the above chart paints the Chiefs and Seahawks as outliers, not necessarily trailblazers. Teams without pricey QBs haven't been completely devoid of success, but it's been far from a full-proof system.

The league has actually had an eerily-similar split when it comes to devoting a lot of money to the QB position:

Teams with a starting QB cap hit under 5%: 117 (41%)

Cap hit between 5%-10%: 61 (21%)

Cap hit over 10%: 110 (38%)

I charted the success of teams with a QB from each of these groups into four buckets: made the playoffs, earned a first-round bye, made the Super Bowl, and missed the playoffs. Note that the y-axis denotes the percentage of teams to meet the x-axis criteria with a QB accounting for x percentage of their salary cap. For example, roughly 30% of teams with a QB accounting for fewer than 5% of their salary cap have made the playoffs since 2011.

NFL teams with a higher percentage of the salary cap devoted to their QB have consistently made the playoffs more often than those with a cheap option under center. We also see similarly-positive trend lines emerge when accounting for more success than simply making the playoffs.

Some additional key takeaways from the above chart:

Note that only 11 teams have had a QB with a cap hit of at least 15% since 2011.

The Super Bowl features the closest group in terms of difference in number of teams with the various cap hits. This isn't particularly surprising; single-elimination playoff tournaments tend to lend themselves towards increased randomness.

Still, the rate of teams with a QB cap hit of at least 10% that earned a first-round bye (16.2%) is nearly double that of the same rate for teams with sub-5% cap hit (8.5%). The same is true for the Super Bowl between the sub-5% group (4.3%) and our 15%-plus group (9.1%).

There does appear to be a positive linear movement towards having more success with a higher-paid QB in all three of our successful categories, and a corresponding negative linear trend for the no-playoffs group. This indicates that the NFL is a fairly-efficient market when it comes to evaluating QBs. I found this to largely also be the case when accessing how QBs perform when switching teams in free agency.

There have been plenty of misses when handing over rich contracts to QBs. Still, the same is (even more) true for teams that have decided to roll with a signal caller on a cheaper contract. It makes sense that we would remember the misses from the former group more than the latter, but either way: it's clear that there isn't one perfect strategy when it comes to figuring out how to pay the QB position.

However, not every cheap QB is created equal. This is true from both a talent perspective in terms of the QB himself, as well as when we consider that certain teams obviously had better success with filling out the rest of their roster. This is a burden all NFL players must bear; QBs might have the most control over the outcome of any given game, but even they're often at the will of their teammates, coaches and opposition alike.

The difference in talent between the cheap QBs is what we'll focus on next. The sub-5% group in the above graph is being weighed down by low-cost veterans and bridge options at the position. I went through the contracts again to specifically see all the instances in which a team's top-paid QB was on a rookie contract. Note that this will exclude instances like Dak Prescott in 2016 and Lamar Jackson in 2018 when their teams were still paying high-priced contracts to Tony Romo and Joe Flacco, respectively.

Overall, there have been 79 instances of a team's top-paid QB being on a rookie contract since 2011. The results paint a more-promising picture than before for teams that are spending down at the QB position.

Rookie deals have helped produce the second-best success rate for making the playoffs, although we've seen less juggernauts from the group compared to teams that have spent up at the position.

One main takeaway from this chart is the reality that teams paying down at the QB position with a low-cost veteran or bridge option have largely been unsuccessful. This makes sense: QBs that have shown any level of competency during their careers are almost never available on the cheap.

There appears to be a bit of a boom-or-bust factor here when trusting rookie QBs, but the practice has had its ups and downs ... like all of the groups.

Ultimately, I think this last point should be our main takeaway. There hasn't been one cookie-cutter method to paying the QB position in recent history. This evidence suggests you're probably better off rolling with a rookie or high-priced option, but even the lower-hit categories still have some examples of success.

Patrick Mahomes and Russell Wilson proved that building a talented team around a rookie QB can lead to plenty of success. On the other hand, the Patriots and Broncos proved that teams can still rack up Super Bowl appearances even with a QB that carries a higher cap hit. Note that teams have the option to spread out contracts and create mini windows despite their high-cost QB. For example, Jimmy Garoppolo's massive $137.5 million contract consists of the following cap hits by season:

2018: 20.9%

2019: 10.6%

2020: 13.4%

2021: 12.5%

2022: 11.9%

The most common theme among good teams is the reality that they usually also have good QBs. This is why it's the highest-paid position in the NFL after all.

Naturally, teams that experience success tend to pay the QB that helped engineer that success (as they should). Paying top dollar at the position hasn't led to overwhelmingly more success than teams that have rolled with lower-cost options, but it's still been the superior choice. If a team doesn't have a solid home-grown option to build their franchise around, they're likely better off going back to the draft than gambling on a mid-level free agent addition.

In a game of inches, every edge counts.