WhoKnows

We weren’t really that good. We were 29th in scoring and we barely ever had a lead so teams didn’t need to go garbage time against us. Good news is that we can only drop 3 spots in scoring defense.

Here’s something funnier. We have retained 2 players in the first four drafts (2016-2019) and other NFL teams have 5 players from just our 2016 and 2017 drafts.

Wouldn’t have mattered. With our luck, we would have taken Simmons instead of Brown.

Robert Hunt was taken 39th, by Miami. Here’s the funny part, we took YGM 1 pick before Hunt. Thank goodness Marty and the. Fitterer didn’t want to fix our OL until it got so bad we were forced to take Iky 6th overall and sign people it looks like we are already replacing after two years.

As we should have twice before. Great opportunities squandered. I don’t think anyone is throwing the towel in on Bryce, but I do expect this to be make or break. Well, I shouldn’t say that yet. If the 2025 QB draft class is more like 2022, we might see year 3 of Bryce. If there are good QB prospects like 2020, 2021 or 2023 then I could see us using the 1st on a QB.

This is for those folks that think the cap doesn’t matter. It does. You can play around with it but it’s not unlimited forever. When you spend on JAGs to the top of the cap for 6 years and produce 2-7 wins while also trading away half your draft picks, you hit a wall, a wall we should have hit in 2020 and again in 2022. We didn’t and now we have nothing and are still running into the top of our cap so hopefully we learned our lesson and take our lumps and suck for 2025. Stinks that 2024 appears to be a helluva draft class. Maybe we can squeak out a few more good picks with Burns.

Definitely not. We were the problem. It’s not the player’s fault. I know Gettleman had his faults but this was one thing he was good at. The money Hurney and Fitterer threw around for mediocre players is unreal and they’ve only produced 2-7 wins for 6 seasons.

Doesn’t matter. The $3M roster bonus was new money owed that would have been added on to his dead cap. If we kept him this year his cap hit would have been 1M more than his dead cap plus there’d be 2M more in dead cap in 2025. Again, you save $3M. It was a bad deal in that they guaranteed his 2024 salary of $6M but that’s par for the course. We sign bad deals and don’t get the performance and then we pay basically $13M for one year.

The problem is our FO has been awful at player evaluations. Hard to blame Sanders’ agent or Elflein/Erving’s agents or any of the otherfrom signing the contracts before the ink dried.

I’m a Clemson fan but if he comes here, he will absolutely be a bust. He’s not on the top tier level. He’s a top tier WR2, not a WR1 like Chase. He’s obviously a top 32 WR so he would be the top WR for a lot of teams, like us, but I don’t think he’s elite enough to be the top WR on a team like ours (weapons and QB deficient.

Yeah, he was able to take the minimum to go to the Steelers, which isn’t a bad call at all. Heck, if he took more, the Broncos might have a clause to claw some back. If that’s the case, I would give my new team the full discount.

Comparing Baker, who has accomplished so much more in his career, even if he sucked for us, to Thomas is laughable. Thomas is the equivalent of Matt Corral, not Mayfield. I don’t get these fans who disappear in season the past 6 years as we’ve sucked balls only to reappear every offseason defending every move the team makes. It’s Ian freaking Thomas. He sucks. All we see of him is lowlights. He’s supposedly a great blocker and yet there are always videos of when he gets blown up by a LB or when he gets taken down easily by a smaller DB. I certainly don’t recall the last team we talked about him doing something good, but by all means we should keep paying him new money and not drafting TEs.

Last year isn’t irrelevant, any cap saved gets rolled over and we could have been done with Thomas in 2023. You don’t save money. You are thinking about 2024 cap only. He has at least $1.75M in new salary money (likely more if restructuring bonus) that is added to any dead cap that does not change. What you are calling saving money is spending more total money but pushing some out to future years. We aren’t competing for a championship any time so so we shouldn’t be restructuring to spend more money this year. We are just eating into next year’s cap for a bad player. We should have released him last year and drafted a TE in that crazy strong TE class. Then we wouldn’t have paid an extra $2.7M in 2023 (his salary and restructuring bonus) and now all that money we could have saved is that dead cap you keep fussing about in 2024. We have that dead cap in 2024 because we made this stupid call last year. It’s easy to understand. Restructuring Thomas last year kicked the dead cap can down the road, but your good decision means we will have paid Thomas $3.4M+ in new money in 2023/2024 that we could have actually saved.

He has no clue. What the heck does this mean? If you release him you lose more money and have to replace him and pay his replacement. I don't think you understand the finances here. We saved money and kept him without pushing anything down the road from what I have read. This to me says he doesn’t get it. People don't seem to get the simplest thing that we save his salary in cap space and would have saved more last year. They don’t see restructuring bonuses and act like it doesn’t matter to keep kicking the can. A day round rookie TE would be better and cheaper. The saving money on a poo player because his salary is less than the dead cap is hilarious. It’s like the “new” money versus already sunk money doesn’t get through. Somehow they think paying for Thomas to not be on the team in 2025/2026 (I’m sure we’ll use void years, otherwise it’s all 2024 cap hit in his last year of his contract) is a good thing because we save cap space in 2024. That’s how we’ve had to waste money on poo FAs the past few years because we couldn’t afford the really good players.

Keeping and continuing to pay Thomas isn’t ever going to be a single.

Don’t have to read the terms. His dead cap cannot be reduced just moved out and increased. Not sure why it’s hard to understand. Dead cap comes from bonuses already paid that spread that money over the years of the deal. Reducing his salary does nothing to dead cap already paid out in his signing bonus or past restructuring bonuses. In 2023 we restructured Thomas and his salary was cut but he also got $1.6M in a restructuring bonus that was spread over 2023 and 2024. It’s likely that the same thing is happening here. Salary cut but a restructuring bonus to push some of that bonus money into future years. It’s the last year of his deal so hopefully we just reduced salary but that $1.75M (possibly more) is still new money. We could save that $1.75M in salary by releasing him like we could have before. There’s no magic here.

It’s not a wash. Dead cap is dead cap. It’s pro-rated bonuses that already happened but haven’t hit the cap. The salary is “new money”, which means we probably spread the dead cap into 2025. So instead of just eating the dead cap, we will end up using another $2M (probably more, there has to be another restructure bonus to spread the cap). Last time we did this, Ian got his $1.6M that “he lost/we saved” in a restructure bonus. He didn’t really lose anything last time, we just pushed more into 2023/2024. Now we are likely pushing to void years in 2025+. We would have save more total last time by just cutting him but we would have had to put all the dead cap into 2023 and well, we did have a better roster than 2022 so better off signing Hurst with the cap we saved in 2023 because we are this close to contending.

And yet, we’d still pay him almost $2M for 2024.

Lol, this is why that dawg poo means nothing to me unless we actually start winning. Plenty of people ran with it in here but it’s no more than a slogan like the rest. Ian Thomas has never shown any type of toughness.

Who cares. This same thing was mentioned before. Oh, he’s taking a little less. That wasn’t true before because we paid him more new money that we could have saved. Seeing this pisses me off. We gave him a big deal he didn’t deserve and because of restructuring we are giving him every cent when he deserved nothing and somehow it helped us ignore the strong TE draft class last year because we had Hurst, Thomas and Tremble, murderer’s row of NFL TEs. Somewhere in New Orleans, Tampa and Atlanta, three DCs just updated their notes to not cover TEs when they play Carolina.

Lol, I always cry a little inside when I see mentions of players who we discussed drafting in here. Biadasz when way later in the 4th than when we took Troy Pride and he went just a handful of picks before we took Kenny Robinson. Those guys played a combined 3 years for us so much better picks than a C one draft after we let Kalil go.

Not me. I’m expecting more of the same. I’m hoping to be pleasantly surprised but I didn’t like Fitterer’s drafting (and everything else) right from the start. Until he proves otherwise, I’m expecting his right hand man to stay the course. Reaching for a C in a super strong WR class makes perfect sense.

I wanted Morse when we got Paradis. Marty went after the guy coming off a huge injury and the rest is history. At this point, not sure I’d want to sign him to a longer deal at 31 (32 next month).

He’s right and the bolded is just completely wrong. The draft is the core of team building, period. 49ers lost to the Chiefs. Go look at their rosters, their cores are absolutely reliant on the draft. There may be a couple key FAs or trades, but the core was drafted (including UDFAs).

Serious delusion here. CMC never quit, period. That was typical Marty/Rhule CYA keeping him on IR when we were out of it. CMC was surprised by the trade and I’ve posted it in here before. Heck CMC signed a long term extension with us. This isn’t like the current Burns situation. CMC and Moore both signed up to be long term Panthers.