Originally Posted by DJ's left nut:
At this point I'm content with a re-set year.
There are just so damn many unknowns. If any of the moves the Chargers, Broncos and Bills have made come to full fruition, Za'darius Smith won't do shit to change how we stack up there.
They're pushing a whole lot of chips in for a year or two and soon enough they'll find themselves where we presently are. Okay.
But to just try to keep it running in the red when we have no idea if we even HAVE to strikes me as unnecessary. These moves may just fizzle out. They're all older guys on the backsides of their respective careers (with a few smaller exceptions).
If you give them their most likely 50% outcomes for all the signings, NONE of these teams are actually appreciably better than we are. With or without Smith.
And man, we can't just keep kicking the can. It's gonna hit us REALLY hard and then the question won't be 'can we sign Za'Darius Smith' but rather 'can we keep La'Jarius Sneed...'?
And **** that. I'm not at all interested in losing Sneed in 2 years because we had to have Smith next season.
At some point you have to decompress and I think we've reached that point. The more you try to move numbers around and see how it impacts next years cap (and then see that as tough as things are now, they'll be orders of magnitude tougher next season if we do these things), the more you realize that we've probably reached a puke point on how aggressive we can be.
Just go after the young vets who appear to be ascending. Or hell, at least appear to be healthy.
And then tell Patrick he's gonna get to throw the ball 650 times.
Absolutely on this whole post!
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Originally Posted by DJ's left nut:
So you want to give someone $16 million/yr to get roughly the same production but in a different style than the guy we have on a rookie deal.
That certainly makes a lot of sense.
Well yeah. It's not like Hardman is going anywhere. The problem was that he was a waste lining up out wide and nobody respected him. People will respect the shit out of Robinson and that will allow us to just use Hardman as a pure gadget guy and he would excel in that role.
I don't see how a offense of Hill, Kelce, Robinson, Hardman isn't the best receiving offense in the league.
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I mean we really can broom the damn cap next year. But we'd have 'bout nothing left on this roster.
Cut Clark and Jones - that saves you $40 million or so off the cap. Go ahead and restructure Mahomes AGAIN and it probably turns his cap number from 46 million to...I dunno, it would probably be around $12 from what I can tell but that's without restructuring it again this year. Do that and you're looking at, I dunno - $19 million? So let's just keep the numbers relatively round and say you can save another $25 there.
So we're talking real mony. We've taken $65 million off next year's cap. And at that point of players that actually matter we have:
Mahomes, Thuney, Kelce, Reid, Butker, CEH, Gay, Bolton, Humphrey, Winchester, Niang, Sneed, Danna, Kaindoh, Gray, Smith and this year's draft picks who will probably add about $7 million to the cap in their own right. That's it y'all.
16 players plus realistically 5 more from this year's draft that likely make the team next year. So you're at 21 players and you've used at that point around $105 million in cap space.
And right now we're still about 20 players away from actually fielding an NFL roster. Even if you figure on HALF of those being low cost rookies from our present pool or draft picks, we need to add 10 guys. And those 10 guys are going to have to carry low year 1 numbers so many of them will need dead money loaded into next season or higher base salaries for next season than this year.
So let's say you get 10 cheap fill placeholder style back of the roster guys. And you get 5 more on 1 year deals. That leaves 5 more that you're gonna backload with either higher salaries or dead money.
So let's just say you're looking at 5 guys with $5 million base salaries in year 2 and thus $25 million in salary. Mind you, these guys will SUCK at those figures, but I'm trying to be generous here.
And let's say the cap goes up to $220 million (fair figure). So now you've spent $130 million on 26 players. So you have half a roster at that point. You haven't brought Tyreek Hill or OBJ back either, mind you. Let's again be generous and hope we can get those guys on cap hits of say $18 millione/each next season.
So you've spent $165 million on 28 players. You still need 15 guys and you have about $55 million in cap space to do it with.
Oh, and your team might just suck as constructed there.
And that's WITHOUT pulling pulling any more levers than just restructuring Mahomes.
We've done this too often for too long. Either this year or next we HAVE to tap the brakes. And with the massive upheaval in the conference, let alone the division, I think now's as good a time as any to take a step back and evaluate to see if anything these guys are doing even MATTERS when you have Patrick Mahomes, Tyreek Hill, Travis Kelce and a monster of an OL.
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