BakoSaint

If we clean house this offseason I have a crazy idea. We are in cap hell with Derek Carr, our highest paid player a liability the team hates, and a cap crunch that forces us to restructure his deal and make it hard to move on even in 2025. If we keep him in 2024 and restructure his contract, the dead cap to cut him in 2025 will be $50 million: $17 million prorated signing bonus + $10 million triggered roster bonus guarantee + $23 million restructured 2024 salary. If we restructure again in 2025 we can have Carr for $18 million in 2025 but then its like $44 million in dead cap to cut him in 2026. It will take awhile for this to end.

One approach is to draft a QB if say we end up with the #7 overall pick. But then that QB languishes with Carr breathing down his shoulder and a compromised roster and cap.

But I just realized there could be another option. We could pull a Goff or Osweiler deal with Carr. Trade our #7 overall pick and Carr to any taker for their conditional 2026 7th round pick. I think some team with lots of cap room would take the offer. Maybe if we have multiple suitors we could even get a 2nd or 3rd back. Then they pay Carr's guaranteed $30 million salary. They pay Carr's $10 million guaranteed 2025 roster bonus (unless they cut him immediately). All we pay is the rest of Carr's prorated signing bonus, a $22.8 million dead cap hit for Carr vs his $35.7 million expected cap charge for 2024. This would be a $13 million savings off the cap from what Carr is currently booked at, and relieve us of $17.1 million of future obligations 2025 and forward, as well as the 2025 $10 million roster bonus guaranteeing.

Technically we could save $23 million by restructuring Carr, but that leaves $50 million in potential dead cap for 2025. So the trade would basically cost us $10 million vs the cheapest restructure now and save us $50 million in 2025. Essentially we would sell our 2024 1st round pick for $40 million of cap relief to accelerate a rebuild. Then we would draft a QB in 2025 with our salary cap greatly healed.

With this option we would not have to start a 1st round rookie QB behind our horrible dangerous oline. We would still have most of our draft picks in rounds 2-7 and could take an oline around #40. In 2025 we could have some cap money and high draft picks to draft a QB and fix the oline more. If we take our rookie QB in 2025, they will be under team control a year longer, when our cap and roster are better rebuilt.

In the long run, this could be the best path to rebuild. And honestly getting rid of Carr might give this team a bounce and we might win as many or more games next year. Dumping a 1st round pick is rough, but we are used to half our 1st round picks never contributing anyway like Penning and Turner. The optimists can say Penning and Turner are finally healthy and it will actually be like we have two 1st round picks for 2024!

And you can say this is crazy, but its not unprecedented. It was done with Brock Osweiler and Jared Goff. Most people would say Derek Carr is a similar disappointment. It cost the Texans a 2nd round pick to offload $16 million of Osweiler's salary in 2017 cap. It cost the Rams a reported 1st round pick (the trade included Stafford and multiple picks so exact breakdown is hard) to offload $43 million of Jared Goff's guaranteed salary in 2021 cap dollars. If anything, a #7 overall pick is expensive to offload Derek Carr's $30-40 million in guaranteed salary (depending on whether the team wants to immediately cut him, or play him in return for triggering $10 million 2025). It would be very much within the reasonable realm of recent NFL transactions for us to be able to offload Derek Carr's guarantees in return for trading back from #7 or so in the draft to the late 1st or early 2nd round, and not impossible that we could offload most of Carr's salary for an early 2nd round pick (if for example we agreed to pay $5-10 million of his guarantees).

Another thing is this could be a draft day trade. We could have discussions in advance. If the QB or other amazing player we really believe in is there at #7 or whatever we could take them. If they are not, instead of taking a fallback option, we could pull the trigger on a Carr trade.