AsylumGuido

And you can just as easily stop commenting on anything I post, right?

We got it. You hate Loomis and everything about him. Fine. We don't have to see every thread here plastered with that hate.

Sinner

Your misuse of the word “hate” does a disservice to any attempt at looking at issues that plague our team, and automatically diverts attention to the Mickey Loomis-flavored lollipop in your mouth. I’m almost certain that it’s unintentional.

saintsfan1976

Tone down the discord. This type of back and forth is detracting from others' experience.

BakoSaint

My skepticism from a month ago regarding Ram's surgery appears to be proving out. The optimism helped make the restructure seem like great news, when in fact it was more of a painful financial necessity. At least we got Ram to take a pay cut for the year in the process, but I prefer to be realistic and not get caught up in the spin on a player with a degenerative knee.

Realistically restructuring Ram with a pay cut to avoid a big immediate cap hit was probably the best of several bad choices available to us. The main thing we guaranteed with the restructure was a $6.5m bonus what would have guaranteed March 16 anyway unless we cut him before that date. Restructuring in a way that guaranteed more would have been a disaster. Cutting him before March 16 to avoid the bonus would have created a dead cap hit of over $30 million dollars, and we already used both of our post-June-1 designations on Thomas and Winston. So in the end we paid $6.5 million for a lottery ticket on the off chance Ram does fully recover and become a star again, or perhaps a 2023 where he comes back but is diminished but still worth around $6.5m, and we get to delay the dead cap hit.

There is nothing terribly wrong with how we handled the Ram situation. We blew a lot more cash with Carr, Jordan, and Thomas in recent contracts. But I think its a lesson for everyone that positive injury updates should be taken with a grain of salt, because appearances are something the organization also manages, and that includes making the moves they have to make look better than they are and then letting fans down gently when bad news looks inevitable and time is running out. Even 'it's not looking great but there is lots of time' may mean 'he's probably done, but we don't want to hit you all at once with that, so lower your expectations, and we'll get back to you.'