The best GM in US sports

Widely regarded as one of the better GMs in the NFL for a long time, Les Snead is the best General Manager in US sports by our metrics. His part in the move from the Rams franchise being also-rans in St Louis to NFC West powerhouses and current Super Bowl champions cannot be underestimated. While his career as Rams GM started slowly with results being very mixed while collaborating with Jeff Fisher as Head Coach: his partnership with Sean McVay has proved incredibly fruitful with the team winning double-digit games in 5 of the 6 seasons they have worked together.

McVay is more involved in personnel matters than many NFL head coaches, however Snead takes ultimate responsibility for the Rams’ salary cap management and his above-average cost-per wins shows he’s a shrewd operator with a knack for moving salaries around to keep a roster of premium veterans in place and in a league where teams often have limited Super Bowl windows and periods of relevancy: Snead and the Rams have maintained a seemingly permanent win-now mentality since 2016.

Staying in Philadelphia: one name surprisingly omitted from the top 10 GMs in US sports list is Eagles GM, Howie Roseman. While the smart-moving exec is wildly recognised as a cunning operator with a keen eye for a trade: he inherited an Eagles team that was very successful in the early 2000s – giving him very little to offer in terms of improving the team’s on-field output. Roseman is a keen ‘capologist’ and his cost-per-win score is almost league-average, but his effectiveness as a GM can only be compared to what came before and he hasn’t had a Head Coach to partner with that compared to Andy Reid since Reid left Philadelphia and moved to the Kansas City Chiefs.

Dave Gettleman retired at the end of the 2021-22 season, but his time with the New York Giant will be remembered mostly for questionable drafting choices (the jury is still out on Daniel Jones and running back Saquon Barkley was drafted over Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson and pro-bowlers like Quenton Nelson), a lack of progression and 14 wins over three seasons. Gettleman took an ageing roster in the twilight of Giants all-time passing leader and two-time Super Bowl champion, Eli Manning’s career and took a backstep. Giants new GM, Joe Schoen started his reign well with two top-ten NFL draft picks, bagging top-tier offensive and defensive line talents that will sure up problem areas for the G-Men. Only will time will tell if Schoen can recapture the magic of Eli’s Giants of the early 2010s.

The top 5 GMs in US Sports by cost-per-win

The home of Moneyball maintains a position in the best spending teams in US sports. David Forst and the Oakland Athletics have the second best cost-per-win score in major US sports and it wouldn’t right to discuss the A’s without touching on their place in sports analysis history. Former A’s GM and current Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations, Billy Beane was at the forefront of the analytics revolution in professional sports and led a change in how all major sports team evaluate player performance, budget allocation and on-field strategy. His successor, David Forst is a Beane disciple and has continued to run the Athletics in a cost effective manner that hasn’t produced pennant wins but has maintained the standards set by team ownership without breaking the bank.

The sole entry from the world of football on the best GMs by cost-per-win list is future hall-of-famer and most successful coach in NFL history, Bill Belichick. In a career that includes six Super Bowl wins, 11 back-to-back division wins from 2009 to 2019 and a lifetime win percentage of .729, all while maintaining a team within the same salary cap as other NFL teams is beyond extraordinary. While his on-field input as a defensive genius and leader is what he will mostly be remembered for, it may be Belichick’s efforts as a salary cap manager and team builder that are his most incredible achievement.

The worst GMs in US sport by cost-per-win

The bad news continues for New York area sports fans as the Jets, Yankees and Giants are the three worst teams in sports when it comes to cost-per-win . Now… the Yankees remain perennial playoff contenders and average 91.2 wins a season over the last decade (discounting the shortened 2020 season). However, that success is coming at a considerable cost, with the pinstripers annually among the highest spending teams in all of sports. Compare their success to, say, the Cleveland Guardians who have a much smaller budget but averaged 87.3 wins over the last decade – it is fair to say that Brian Cashman and the Yankees organisation aren’t spending their budget as wisely and that drives down their cost-per-win score.

OnlineBetting.com’s experts compared the win/loss percentage of the team’s current GM with the previous five years before his tenure.

Calculating the financial performance of GMs across different sports is far more complicated. The finances of NFL, NHL and NBA are largely controlled by a salary cap in each sport, with some flexibility in the NBA. In the MLB there is a salary figure over which teams must pay a luxury tax on top of any money they spend on paying players. This diversity means it’s hard to evaluate teams from different sports, particularly where some sports teams are encouraged and in fact required to pay a minimum amount to players (in the NFL teams must spend at least 95% of the salary cap), and in others they are incredibly frugal and try to spend as little as possible (take for example the Baltimore Orioles who will spend less than $50mil for their total payroll in 2022, less than 20% of the top spending MLB team, the Los Angeles Dodgers).

With this in mind: teams were measured by how much they spent as a percentage of their league’s average spend, divided by their win/loss percentage. This gives us a reliable and versatile metric which can be used to evaluate the effective spending of a GM in any major sport.

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