kungfoodude

Carr at $35/year? So I assume this is Darnold at $0/year? Otherwise that math isn't correct.

I mean, that sounds about right for the basis of your argument. Try watching some Derek Carr film at some point. There is no comparison.

Yeah, I mean I really just don't think you actually have watched Carr this year or any year if you think that.

There isn't even a comparison between the two QB's. Carr is in the group of QB's just behind the elite QB's in the NFL(three time Pro Bowler) and Darnold would be considered a mid-tier backup at best. Not to mention that Carr's three worst NFL seasons would be close to Sam Darnold's best three in QBR/QB Rating. The statistical comparison on averages alone makes this insanely laughable. Carr would immediately make the Panthers(depending on HC, obviously) the prohibitive NFC South favorite. But......the price tag is likely to be high. And will the owner buy off on another re-tread QB after the past few offseasons?

Yeah, this is literally what I am talking about.

I don't mind it as much because I tend to lean heavily towards the players on the labor issue. That said, I don't know that I would want Lamar on a fully guaranteed deal either.

The issue is that you can get a decent tight end that can do what you are describing in the 2nd to 4th rounds. So....why spend a top 10 pick on that guy? If you want a Kittle or Kelce, that is worth a top 10 pick. But....you better hope he is that guy. Ultimately this is about drafting way, way, way outside of positional value. The only time that ever really makes sense is for a truly elite, HOF caliber player. Positional value exists for a reason....it's literally set by the current value in the NFL.

The bigger issue is that you are angling for an elite guy worth that pick and there are maybe 3-5 of those in the NFL at any one time. Those are really the only guys that are worth that kind of draft capital. So, you REALLY need to nail that pick.

Lamar is the next one to watch on that. He wants a fully guaranteed contract and the owners are getting pretty upset about these fulluly guaranteed deals. If he gets his way, you might see even more of them.

Okay, "bottomless" is a poor choice of words. It's more about managing how the cap hits fall. That can theoretically be done forever.....if most of your gambles work well and you make the right choices. It only takes one Michael Thomas or CMC level decision to make a large impact to your cap when you weren't anticipating it. Which, we need to keep this in mind because we have a guy like Burns who is going to need a deal very soon and this on the tail of signing Moore to a big deal. Or even a guy like Jackson who we signed to a decent sized contract who may never be the same player again after that injury. It is events of that nature that can start to poke holes in your overladen ship.

You are doing the classic thing that you do, inventing arguments in your head that I am not making. You can take what I said at face value or just fill in the blanks with whatever is bouncing around in your head. I will let you continue that argument with yourself.

It is a loophole. It is an accounting trick built in to the way the salary cap works. It just took some longer to figure out how to exploit it and invent to ways to abuse it. Hence why there have been discussions in owners meetings and league meetings about restricting the ability to use void years the way they are currently being used. Yes the void years immediate hit when they leave. The intent of the void years is to buy time to lessen those impacts(like making space with other salaries by creating void years in their contracts). You don't escape the money hitting the cap, you just tightrope walk the line of being able to space those hits out and still afford the talent necessary to win. It's a bet that the cap will keep increasing and that you will be able to mete out the big contracts accordingly so that you don't end up in Hurney cap hell.

I am not sure how much worse positioned they are. I think our current coaching cycle will determine that, TBH.

The loophole that exists for certain teams is the ability to keep paying out vast sums of cash in signing bonuses over and above the norm. As we all are aware, those massive signing bonuses are paid out at the time of signing. So some owners may not be willing to shell out all that coin regularly. It's not that it isn't accessible, per se, moreso that some are not going to choose to spend money like that. There are notoriously cheap owners in the NFL. Yeah, I mean "drop off" as in those void years are not infinite. They eventually end. So if you play the game, they drop off and are just replaced by the next guy(or guys) you are pulling the same cap magic with. It's a tightrope walk, without question.

I am generally saying the same thing. He didn't want to suffer through a QB search again. I do find it interesting that the two guys we are talking about really care more about their legacies rather than winning. But, it is what it is.

"The NFL was no rookie at the Disinformation Playbook by the time Omalu published his initial paper on Webster in 2005. High-profile concussion-related retirements and injuries in the early 1990s had prompted reluctant NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue to create the NFL-run Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee (MTBI). Beginning in 2003, MTBI published research in the journal Neurosurgery (whose editor-in-chief consulted for the New York Giants) that heavily downplayed the breadth and severity of concussions." https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nfl-tried-intimidate-scientists-studying-link-between-pro-football-and-traumatic-brain

They won't. It will have to be the media that pushes it.

Whoa...whoa...whoa......WHOA. Are you telling me that an NFL funded study didn't have accurate results????

Yeah, that is why those threads now all disappeared from every offseason. We all finally realized that they were far, far smarter than we were about how that would work. It is literally SOP for the overwhelming majority of NFL franchises.

It is a bottomless well, you can kick the can forever and as old contracts drop off they are replaced by new ones. It isn't real because it quite literally doesn't work the way it was intended. The intent was a fair system that allows small market teams to compete with larger market teams whole simultaneously suppressing salaries across the league so that it doesn't turn into soccer or MLB. Well.....the first part of that hasn't worked well because of these loopholes. The second part works somewhat well. The loopholes will continue to be exploited as long as they exist because it is a way teams and owners with more money can get a POTENTIAL competitive advantage. It doesn't mean you can completely buy a Super Bowl every year, that doesn't work. But it can allow you to keep and acquire a LOT of talent. Vastly more so than if you aren't using those loopholes. But, it is a double edged sword. If you mismanage those assets while performing this juggling act, you might have to make some difficult decisions a few offseasons. We are not a team that should be worrying about the salary cap. We are not even REMOTELY in bad shape.

Payton jumped ship because he saw there was no answer at QB and there appeared to be none coming. But, part of that was his dumb fault for the Taysom Hill nonsense. The Saints are in a bad spot because they have no QB and they have a bad head coach. The core of that team is quite good, although they have some very bad contracts they are suffering through(Kamara, Thomas).

As others have said, you will never construct a truly perfect roster but you try anyway. If we have a decent draft and make a couple of key FA signings, this could be an 11+ win team. We aren't spectacularly far away from a contending roster. Our biggest worry is less personnel and more coaching. If we can finally get the right coaching in the organization, I think we will be fine.

I am guilty of saying this about TMJ, although he hasn't exactly looked like a stud, regardless. That takeaway should be that almost all of our players deserve some freedom from judgement during the Rhule era. He had a way of ruining a lot of things.

The salary cap is intended to make sure all teams have an annual limit to what they spend on salary. However that is literally not what happens. You can go an INSANE amount over that limit(like the Rams did) to win in a year span(or multiple years, if you want). That is precisely why I say it isn't real. It isn't any more real than saying that the if I make $578,125 in income in 2023 that I have to pay 37% in income taxes. Sure....if I am an idiot and don't use every available loophole to ensure that doesn't happen. That is what is happening here. Teams use these loopholes to make that salary cap almost nonexistent. CMC is a great example of an insanely bad personnel move. We paid a lower value player an insane sum of money that he was not worth. And then we doubled down by making this deal very unfriendly to the cap. So when you make mistakes like that, you can either cut bait like we did, eat a player that kills your cap or keep extending him forever to alleviate the impact of the original dumb decision. Shaq is yet another example of this. Creating cap problems isn't nearly as detrimental to your future as trading away premium draft capital in a "win now" mode. THAT is how you end up fuged in the long term. Because not having cheap and potentially elite talent to bring along as you replace more expensive players is a recipe for disaster.

I mean, it is literally not real. You can pay in a single year massive amounts of money over it but you can prorate it to the ends of the earth to keep those figures down. Then when the base salary money starts rising, convert to signing bonus, prorated out further and create more cap. It is a complete shell game. That is what most intelligent teams do. Like I said, you still can't spend like a drunken sailor on underperforming players because that will 100% catch up to you.