The Patriots have found the perfect formula for winning football games: Tom Brady, Bill Belichick and smart spending.
Businessweek listed the Patriots as the fourth-smartest spenders in sports over the past five years, behind only the Nashville Predators, Florida Marlins and Tampa Bay Rays.
The formula for the list is simple. Looking at the past five completed season (2006-10), the list takes into account postseason appearances, average wins per season and average cost per win, crunching the numbers into an efficiency index measured by standard deviation above or below the league norm. Okay, maybe it's not simple.
Only with a formula this complicated could losing seasons (the Marlins average 78.8 wins in the past five seasons) be justified on a dollars-per-win basis.
Regardless, the Patriots come in at $8.6 million per win over the past five seasons.
According to unofficial Patriots salary cap page patscap.com, Brady's salary is the team's highest by over $8 million. The Patriots' total cap figure for 2011 is $109,846,530. With the above formula, the Patriots are even more efficient than they were from '06-'10, currently at around $8.1 million per win.
Remember when the Patriots were criticized for not breaking the bank on free agents? Although that's changed in recent years with big deals for Brady, Vince Wilfork and others, it's fair to point out that they've been a winning franchsie all the while.
Also on the list, the Celtics came in at 26th, the Bruins ranked 82nd, and the Red Sox rounded out the bottom of the Boston order at 111th.
