yeah, hurney's philosophy was "let's just see what we can do today and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow." it was all about immediate needs or taking care of the past...nothing preparing for the future, which is why he traded away future picks and structured contracts the way he did. his focus was always on yesterday and today.
now gettleman is stuck trying to fix crap left by a guy with no vision for the future.
one thing that absolutely horrifies me is what would hurney have done to fix this mess? the only thing i can think of is what i saw from him in the past....mortgaging our future so that we can keep old players we feel an obligation to under this philosophy that "you don't let talent walk".
looking at the longview is good...but i think that among other things, he's having to keep in mind we've got a star franchise QB whose going to be getting paid boocoos and boocoos of money, esp. if we become serious contenders. he's got to be preparing the long term cap for that and i think he is, but that's one of the things we're going to have to be expecting when stuff really starts happening with the cap and personnel changes come along.
i'm not buying enthusiasm that williams and stewart will be around long term. only way that happens is if one or both make serious changes in their contracts and since stewart just had his renegotiated, i can't see him doing it again for a couple years. we just can't afford to have all that money tied up there, esp. long term. same with LB because luke is going to be getting paid a ton of cash the year after cam does.
it will be interesting to see how all this shakes out. i just can't imagine it will happen painlessly, but i have confidence it will.
We don't have to really worry about Newton for at least 3 more years. I suspect we will sign him to a mega-deal after his 4th year instead of exercising the fifth year option. When we do it, the contract will likely average 20 million a year but remember that, since we will pay a big chunk of it in a signing bonus, the salary for the first year is always relatively modest making the cap manageable that year. It is when we get out to year 3 and beyond that the cap space tops 20 million. By then he has been with us for 7 or 8 years and we either know he is a deal at that price or we need to be moving on if he regresses. I personally think we will be paying him gladly given that the increase in the cap due to the TV deal should more than handle the difference we will paying him from the 5 million we are paying now. Barring of course another borrowing episode which flattens the cap assuming the TV contract is as lucrative as everyone predicts.
