BakoSaint

https://www.thescore.com/nfl/news/2185058

Every major sports league except the NFL offers fully guaranteed contracts. The Saints strategy of blowing up future salary caps even with backloaded deals and then restructuring annually to back load even more, to the extent that all their big long term contracts have to be restructured annually to keep them under the cap, effectively means that any player who signs a long term contract with the Saints effectively has their entire deal guaranteed. The Saints can’t afford to cut Peat, Hill, or Thomas is they underperform, and in the later years of the contracts where it looks like we could afford to cut them, we will restructure the deals enough by that time that we wont be able to when the time comes. Sure, we cut players we trade for late in existing deals, but we dont cut our own big contracts no matter what, its impossible with Loomis’ strategy. So if the contracts are guaranteed in all but name, why not actually guarantee them?

By setting the precedent and offering players like Williams, Davenport, or Winston a 100% fully guaranteed contract, the Saints can only win. Such terms could allow the Saints to offer a little less and still win a bidding war. We should have given Peat, Hill, Thomas, Kamara, Lattimore, etc fully guaranteed deals because we can never afford to cut any of them anyway and we could have saved money on total contract. Also, if we begin offering players fully guaranteed contracts, it may set a precedent that other teams have to do the same to compete, and by a domino effect it becomes a league wide standard. This could benefit our team because it could neutralize the competitive disadvantage that Mickey Loomis’ cap management strategy imposes on us in being unable to cut players like Peat and Hill to save cap, nobody would be able to cut such players anymore to save cap.

We are already doing it, so why not just put it in writing? I see no disadvantage.