Peon Awesome

Multiple concussions didn't affect his brain?

It is baffling how many people say you trade for Watson no matter what you have to give up because a franchise qb changes everything, even though a Houston playoff team traded away multiple picks to win now, gets a fantastic year from a healthy Watson, and actually LOSES MORE GAMES THAN THE PANTHERS. Wake up people. Yes, make an aggressive offer for Watson. But be reasonable about it. If it doesn't afford you a realistic opportunity to build a complete roster, then we shouldn't do the trade. It's as simple as that. Unless of course your goal isn't super bowl wins and just having a more fun offense to watch. But I'd prefer bigger picture.

You have to be out of your mind if you think Brian Burns, the 8th pick and the Panthers 2022 1st rounder isn't enough for pick 2. Any GM who would trade all of that for the 2nd pick would rightly never work anywhere within a billion miles of an NFL front office. I shudder to think anyone would even consider that trade for the Panthers, let alone think it's not enough.

Why stop there though? If you're Houston and trading away Watson and I'm offering 3 1sts, 3 2nds, Burns, CMC, and Donte Jackson but not including DJ Moore, Chinn and the next 3 3rd round picks too, are you taking my offer seriously? I mean you're not offering every single valuable asset you have? What kind of fool do you make me out to be?! How dare the Texans even consider an offer including 3 1sts and a promising young pass rusher in Gross-Matos. Get out of here with that weak crap.

If we learned anything from last year it's that jumping to sign players at the start of free agency rather than being patient and waiting for players' values to declare themselves is not smart business. That's how we ended up handing out a big contract to Bridgewater rather than sitting tight and seeing that comparable players were getting paid peanuts. I hope we stay minimally active for the next couple months outside of perhaps super low ball bargain contract offers. As time goes on, fewer and fewer teams will have any cap space and even better quality players will get cut as teams scramble to make more.

2009-2011 was almost historically awful. The numbers don't even tell the whole story. It includes the Everette Brown trade up in 2009 and Armanti Edwards in 2010. Cam Newton was the only player worth a damn in 2011 despite picking number 1 in each round. Hurney was very rightly fired after that although drafting Kuechly and Norman in his final year was his saving grace. That being said, by the same metrics Hurney was surprisingly excellent before 2009. He was top 10 in 6 of his first 8 years, and 12th one of the other 2. He really only had 1 bad year in 2003 but even that draft had Jordan Gross and Ricky Manning Jr. So much for that start.

Your numbers seemed too good to be true so I had to double check. Unfortunately the number you're quoting doesn't include our dead cap. Our cap hit is actually the number you quoted plus the dead cap number you mentioned. So you have to take out another $20 million. So we actually have about $18 million right now. Of course that number will be a fair bit higher after more obvious cuts take place like Weatherly. I figure when all is said and done we'll have about $30 million without trying and could be significantly more if we wanted to get creative or offload some contributors but that seems unnecessary.

https://www.pro-football-reference.com/hof/hofm_WR.htm This is a pretty neat resource. Puts Steve Smith kind of on the bubble but their average Hall of Fame value is skewed by Jerry Rice blowing everyone out of the water. The only eligible players not in the HoF ahead of him (and not by much) are Reggie Wayne and Torry Holt and I suspect they will both get in soon. They both probably would have been in by now but suffer from being overshadowed by another player on their team already in the hall (Isaac Bruce and Marvin Harrison) whereas Smith doesn't suffer from that problem as the bona fide #1 his career. Also if you alternatively sort the list by approximate value, only Reggie Wayne is above him. My guess? I think he is comfortably in and should get elected by around year 3 of eligibility but first ballot seems unlikely. As an aside, both Julius Peppers and Luke Kuechly comfortably make the thresholds, so expect them to be in, probably 1st ballot, even with Kuechly's abbreviated career.

That's the thing though. You're referencing the past whereas I'm referencing the future. Where did I praise our handling of the last few years or suggest teams are envious of the Panthers of the last few years? I am in no way praising our previous management. You're completely missing the point of my post if that's the takeaway. The whole point is we've been mired in an awful cap situation for the better part of the decade and saddled with tremendous amounts of dead cap the last couple years and finally, when lots of teams are seeing the squeeze of a contracting COVID-effected cap, our cap situation is above average and only likely to get significantly better with the last few bad contracts of the old regime set to come off or with an easy out by 2022. Granted, that's assuming our new GM doesn't eff things up, but I think most people are cautiously optimistic he has to do a better job than what we've had. Yeah, we have holes, who doesn't? We only have 2 free agents worth a damn to sign, 1 of whom honestly won't be worth paying his market even if we had $70 million in cap space and the other we will easily afford with little cap manipulation. We don't even have to make a single hard cut like lots of other teams. Cut just the deadweight that isn't helping our team anymore (Short, Weatherly, Palardy) and we'll have more money than we need. We're not at the point where recklessly spending millions in free agency makes any sense so why do we need $80 million anyway when the $40 million we'll probably end up with when all is said and done will more than suffice. Especially when teams like New Orleans are sitting without a qb and have to gut 1/3 of their roster just to get under the cap without signing a single free agent. Would I rather be New Orleans from 2017-2020? Hell yeah. Would I rather be New Orleans moving forward? Open to debate but for me, honestly no.

You got it all wrong. We have very little dead money on our books now. Most of it is Kuechly's. We'll add some to it with Short but it's not going to look anything like the last year or two. Our cap situation, as long as we don't screw it up moving forward, is looking pretty damn good over the next couple years. Stop living in the past. And I highlighted the absolute worst teams cap-wise for comparison. Some of them are good teams, but a couple are even worse than us. You're also forgetting we have the 15th most cap space. That means 17 teams have less cap than us. Not just the few I mentioned. Way different than having the worst cap situation in the league. Literally every single team with more cap space than us either has no real QB (like the Colts and Patriots) or a rookie QB, except for the Bucs, which damn, kudos to them. They also got Brady at a bargain. But goes to show, when you have a cost controlled player at the most expensive position in football, you're going to have more money to work with. We're already ahead of the curve despite having little cap to roll over with all the dead money last year. Now give us a 1st round qb and unload Teddy's cap hit next year and we'll be sitting near the top of the list.

Moton deserves a big payday and I predicted a couple months ago that his agent would clamor for him to get paid comparably to the highest paid left tackles. But there's a difference between what your agent is going to demand and what a team is realistically going to offer. Using Ronnie Stanley, a 1st team all pro left tackle the year before his contract extension, as a starting point for Moton, a right tackle who has never made a single pro bowl or all pro team, is silly. I'm fine with something around $15 million per year but anything pushing $20 million is getting a bit ridiculous.

I'm not a cap guru but if it is possible to rewrite all of Short's 2021 salary including roster and workout bonuses into a league minimum salary (roughly $1 million rather than $14.5 million), I would offer him that. It would drop his 2021 cap hit to about $7.5 million, saving us +$13 million this year and then we're left with the roughly $4.5 million of dead cap in 2022 that was part of the restructure. It would be a way to free up even more cap this year without waiting until June and gives you a former pro bowl DT to at minimum mentor the young guys and if he can stay healthy, get some snaps at a position which we need bodies. If he wants anything more, I would let him walk. Since he basically hasn't played in 2 years and most teams are cap strapped with the diminished 2021 cap, he probably wouldn't get much more as a free agent. He may decide he'd rather take the $1 million, rather than uproot his whole life to make maybe a million more elsewhere. Either way, we have all the leverage.

Whoa slow down buddy. The Saints want to have a word with you. Hell the Eagles, Rams, Falcons, Chiefs, Packers or Steelers would all be over the frickin moon to swap cap space with the Panthers. For the record, the Panthers are 15th in the NFL in cap space, technically slightly above average. Plus they have 2 obvious cuts in Weatherly and Short that frees up an extra $16 million even without designating either as a post-June 1st cut; those moves alone would jump them up to 8th, all else being equal. Let's rein back the hyperbole.

It genuinely baffles my mind that a team might offer something of value for Wentz. Philly has to be desperate to get rid of him and that terrible contract. There must be some kind of media manipulation to make it look like there's a bidding war for him. They talked about a trade being imminent before the super bowl and yet there still is none. Why? Because no one is offering anything close to what they hoped I'm sure. I mean this with all sincerity; the only way I would even consider a Wentz trade is if the deal involved sending Teddy and GETTING at least a day 2 pick (2nd or 3rd). I'm not stupid to think Philly would actually do that but any other scenario and I'm getting the hell out of that. Getting Wentz adds $25 million to our 2021 cap. Even with trading Teddy back, our cap hit goes up by $15 million. Good luck building an offensive line for Wentz. We saw how abysmal he looked under pressure last year. At least Teddy would check down or pull the ball down and run for 4 yards. For kicks let's even compare their stats on a per game basis in 2020: Wentz: 57.4% completions, 241.3 total yards (218.3 passing), 1.75 total tds (1.33 passing), 1.25 int, 0.83 fumbles, 4.2 sacks taken. Bridgewater: 69.1% completions, 267.5 total yards (248.9 passing), 1.33 total tds (1 passing), 0.73 int, 0.4 fumbles, 2.1 sacks taken. Don't get me wrong. I want to upgrade from Teddy. It's just not objectively clear that the current version of Wentz actually accomplishes that.

You're right that Kalil's contract wasn't exactly a devastating albatross that crippled our cap. The anger of it when directed at that specific aspect is overblown. But it was awful nonetheless. Most of our other bad contracts are for players that got paid more than they're worth or got injured but when healthy, made our team better. Shaq is a good example. Spending $13 million on a coverage linebacker not named Luke Kuechly is not the best use of that money. But he's still a plus on defense over whoever else might step in to replace him. Meanwhile we were significantly better signing a guy off his couch to replace Kalil than when he played. Kalil was so laughably bad, we probably would've been better lining up Manhertz in that spot and foregone a LT altogether than trot him out there. You mention we were 11-5 his 1st year. That makes it worse. Imagine if we had a competent LT or used his $12 million that year to sign someone at another position of need. We were a play from beating the Saints. Hell we probably win a couple more games and host them rather than go on the road. Do we make a run at another super bowl? And the next year, do we have someone more competent to stop TJ Watt from nearly ending Cam's career? Whatever way you look at that, that Kalil contract was abysmal. It may have averaged out to $6.25 million per year over 4 years, but he was only on the team for 2 of those years and the 2 he was there, we were a better team without him.

He's actually pretty complimentary of the Panthers, saying we've had "a solid span of drafts", but I agree the analysis is lacking. I'd say trading up and drafting Little was the worst, followed by taking Butler in the 1st to ride the bench for 4 years. Both of those were more detrimental than anything that happened in the later rounds.

I'll echo others' sentiments. Either a 5th-7th round draft pick or a minimum salary free agent. We've got far bigger concerns to waste resources on WR 3, especially when we have McCaffrey.

For the record, I agree with you. These scenarios we would be trading 2/multiple 1sts. I think it's the other people that are being obtuse. There's no given that we have to give up pick 8 to get pick 2 or 3. What if we traded DJ Moore and a 3rd rounder for pick 3? If swapping 1sts doesn't count as trading a 1st, how do you differentiate that from trading DJ, pick 8 and our 3rd?

Brutal injury makes him a bit of a wildcard but I'd much rather offer a backloaded contract for Dak than give up 5 picks for Watson. We could make the numbers work by doing something like 5 years $170 million, $30 million signing bonus, $30 million guaranteed base salary in 2022 and $20 million guaranteed in 2023 after a certain date (so $80 million total guaranteed) but only a $2 million base in 2021 for a 2021 cap hit of only $8 million. Not sure what kind of actual contract he'll demand but given the injury, that seems at least competitive given the possibility he won't return to pre-injury form.

The problem is that someone is likely to offer Samuel a contract more befitting of a solid #2/borderline #1 than a slot/gadget guy that he is and we don't need to be getting in a bidding war at that rate. McCaffrey also needs some slot reps. Hell, I'd rather dumpster dive for my WR3, get a solid 2nd rb and play more 2 RB sets with McCaffrey as a receiver.

It's at least a debate who was more deserving but no way it should've been that lopsided. Chase Young was also playing alongside a defensive line full of 1st rounders. Chinn was playing with mostly scrubs in the backfield and between him and Burns, carried our defense to respectability. Bias aside, he would've gotten my vote.

If there was ever a time for an entire unit to win MVP, it's now. The entire Bucs defense deserves it. It's unbelievable what they did to a seemingly unstoppable Chiefs offense.

The 2 games have a lot of similarities. One team getting the brunt of favorable calls but at the same time, their defense just completely manhandling the opposing team to the point it's not clear if it would've mattered. Panthers game would've been a lot more competitive than this at least.

He could cure COVID and cancer and you'd hate him more than Clausen and Weinke? Seems a bit extreme but we're all entitled to our opinions. I think it's a bit emblematic of some of the Huddle histrionics. Bridgewater is a great backup, below average starter. The way some people present him, you'd think he makes Clausen look like Mahomes.

Up until recently I would have said it was obvious that we would have to give a little something (probably a day 3 pick) to entice someone to take Teddy. Perhaps the extra 5th was that for Stafford. But now with the news, if you believe it, that there's an actual trade market for Wentz, who by most metrics looked worse than Teddy this year and whose contract is so so much worse, I'm no longer 100% sure.