Originally Posted by BakoSaint
(Post 975553)
So for Point A, the contracts we should move on from in my opinion are those of Andrus Peat, Jameis Winston, Michael Thomas, Alvin Kamara, and Taysom Hill. Everyone can have their own opinions but those are the contracts that stand out to me. But the exact players are not important, the real question is could we move on from any bad contract if we wanted to. I don't see it as a reasonable defense to say we don't have any bad contracts and we never will have any bad contracts so it doesnt matter. Every team has bad contracts, and when you future caps are already more leveraged than any other team and your bad contracts are getting renegotiated every year to backload more money that will come due if you move on, it makes it hard to get out of a bad contract when and when you have one. The dead cap if we cut those players is as follows: Thomas $32m, Peat $21m, Hill $24m, Kamara $25m, and Winston $15m. Thomas has 3 consecutive years of injury missing 80% of his games overall in that time. Peat averages 12 games played per season his entire career and our oline will never not have instability and injury shuffles that negatively affect every other olineman as long as he is around. Winston is QB whose season has been ended by injuries 2 years in a row playing backup on a team with a youngish starter, a 4th round pick we traded up for, and another backup option in Hill, way too much redundancy for a guy we would bench Andy Dalton to bring back last year. Most people thought the Saints would move on from Peat, Thomas, and Winston this offseason but instead we kept all 3 because it allowed us to hold off the credit card bill one more year. Logic says thats why we did it, not because we love all 3 players. All I see the last few years is we can only move on from our short term deals. Whenever a player is with the team long on a big contract we restructure and backload the contract all to hell and we can never move on because its never cheaper to move on than to restructure if you are so far above the cap you can only afford to live one cap year at a time. The only long term player we could move on from was Armstead and thats because he wasn't washed and the bidding war therefore made it more expensive to keep him. We have a system set up that selects FOR retaining washed players and liabilities.
Kamara's peers McCaffery, Cook, and Elliott have all been cut or traded away. Nobody in this league commits big money to an aging RB whose stats have already begun to decline. Yet here we are with Kamara associated with $25 million dead cap if we move on. And none of those other RBs are in line for 6+ game suspensions. Not only did we not look to reduce the money due to Kamara this offseason, we increase the money due in reality. Kamara would have lost game checks when suspended, but instead we converted 90% of his salary to a bonus due to our cap situation. What that means is his game checks go from about $500,000 to more like $50,000 so we figured out a way to get a declining RB 90% of his pay while suspended for assault, while other teams with similar RBs found a way to move on. Kamara is due to $19 million next year, but don't worry, we can restructure and bring it down to $11 million by guaranteeing him another $8 million even if he commits another assault and making his dead cap number more like $32 million in the 2024-2025 offseason when he will be even older and in a running back by committee.
Taysom Hill is very injury prone over his college and pro career. He is also much older, about Cam Newtons age. He is also a player whose best attributes are power running and special teams returns and coverage, not very safe positions against injury. We tried him as a starting QB and it did not work. Then we tried him as a TE and he got beat out for the #1 gig by an undrafted free agent converted WR. He is dangerous with the ball but he just isn't great at running routes or catching passes. So what are we paying $10-15 million a year for? An injury riddled 33 year old running back who has never achieved 100 rushing attempts but racks up eye popping highlights in a few games against bad defenses while absolutely disappearing in other games? A backup TE who managed 77 yards receiving on the season? A backup QB to take the ball out of our $40 million a year QBs hands when we already have a $10 million backup QB and a 4th round pick backup QB we traded up for?
But I am sorry. The Saints have no bad contracts. All these contracts are wonderful. And if they did all struggle we could easily take the cap hits to move on. Well, either that or we are basically hoarders who maxed out our credit cards and get by telling ourselves that really we are rich because the trash in the living room is all priceless collectables we can't throw away.
The other concern is there are contracts we don't want to get out of now but might soon. Star cornerbacks have a way of being great until they are garbage. See Nnamdi Asamgaugh and Darrelle Revis. Lattimore is getting older and missing more time. The day is going to come when his contract is a liability, and the smart thing to do is to let things come to a natural conclusion at the end of the deal when the cap hit is small. But instead we restructure to backload it more every year. We are probably looking at $30 million dead cap when we need to move on. Likewise we hope Derek Carr is the next Drew Brees but he may also be the next Drew Bledsoe. If he is the latter, I can't see how we will ever be able to afford to move on if a young QB like the 4th rounder we drafted comes to replace him. We will restructure Carr every year and we could be looking at $50 million plus dead cap if we need to move on in 2025 or 2026 after restructures to backload and convert his $30 million salaries in 2024 and 2025.
Point B examples of teams we can't match because they saved money. The Bucs cleaned up their cap before they made their run with Brady, giving them the ability to bring in more stars when they went all-in, yielding them a Super Bowl. The Rams did a similar thing, before they started their run with Goff they had a war chest of cap room. They leveraged to the max over time. But now both the Rams and Bucs have added trophies and are both rebuilding and moving on from expensive players. But also I don't think we will match up well against the Falcons and Panthers this season. They both shed a lot of bad contracts like Ryan, Julio Jones, Deion Jones, McCafferey, etc. The Falcons took some key free agents from us. The Panthers kept their draft picks and have the #1 pick QB.
But lets say every draft pick and free agent we acquired this season hits the lottery and we go to the Super Bowl and have a grueling coin flip match against the Chiefs and threaten to shut Patrick Maholmes out of any more rings in his prime. The Chiefs are $51 million under the 2024 cap. We are $61 million over the 2024 cap. They can out spend us because they have saved. Meanwhile we are maxing out the credit cards to go 7-10. We will get under the cap in 2024 but we will do it by letting go young stars and hanging on to washed up liabilities willing to restructure and add void years.
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