[Anthony]

While the salary cap does reduce the importance of the draft, another, oft-overlooked plank in the NFL's economic platform - the seniority-based "wage scale" that came out of the first strike, in 1982 - has the opposite effect. Because of the wage scale, it makes a lot more sense to fill a weak area on your roster with a "cheap" rookie you draft rather than an expensive veteran you sign as a free agent. The wage scale also tends to establish a correlation between the median age of a team's roster and their total payroll - and hence, how much room they have under the cap; with this in mind, mortgaging the future for quick fixes puts a team at a double disadvantage, since not only does it cut them off from access to young talent, but it also robs them of salary-cap flexibility.