New Orleans Saints Forums - blackandgold.com - NEWS Granderson Signs 4 year, $52 Million Extension

If we have a winning season and look on track to contend in 2024 this is good. There is some risk that he has past legal infractions and has never been a full time starter for a full season to prove his durability, but everything comes with risk and at least he has been healthy and kept his hands clean lately and has good size.

The problem will be if we have a losing season, which is still very possible with our wins coming by a total of 4 points over two losing teams so far. We are now $72 million over the 2024 salary cap. Can we get under it? Yes, easily, by restructuring all our big contracts which will put us in the same situation in 2025. The problem is that if we have a losing season, we might want to get out of one or two of our big contracts. But if we try to get out of a big contract we take a hit AND we can't restructure that contract instead to save money. So as we sign more of these deals with Granderson, Ruiz, etc, the problem is that if we decide to rebuild we literally can't anyway, it doesn't matter, because we will have no choice but to take every big contract we have in the 2024 offseason and restructure it to push money down the road, we won't be able to afford to cut or trade anyone big because the cap hit it would trigger would ruin our plan to shave $72 million off our cap. The more contracts we sign when we are already the most over the cap in the league for next year, the more we pile boulders onto the soap box car racing down the hill. If it all works out, we may get ahead in the race. If it doesn't, we are going to crash very very hard.

Personally, I would have waited a few more weeks even if we had to pay a little more. Granderson looked impressive in camp and has been impressive so far this season. But in camp he faced our oline. In preseason he faced some backups and lousy teams. So far this season he faced the Titans and Panthers olines which did not impress. If we waited until midseason we could make sure we are on track to win and that Granderson has been effective against a larger sample size of teams. If we struggle against better competition and might have to rebuild, it would then make more sense to let Granderson go and use the money to take some of the cap hits neccessary to rebuild such as moving on from Thomas, Kamara, Hill, and any other big contracts that struggle. Granderson may be a fine contract for a team with a normal cap situation, but with our cap situation of being extremely leveraged and our uncertain status as a contender vs rebuild for next offseason, I think I would have slightly preferred to be more cautious. Currently we are 2-0. But currently the Falcons are also 2-0. If we beat the Falcons twice and win the division, great. But if they beat us twice and win the division, they are a much younger team, and a rebuild in 2024 would be smarter than expecting a different result. But with the contracts we have done, it doesn't matter if a rebuild would be smarter, we simply wouldn't be able to start one until 2025 at the earliest even if we wanted to, because we can't afford to do anything but restructure all our expensive players.