2025 Salary Cap Offense/Defense

[LinvilleGorge]

2 minutes ago, Icege said:

The team is in desperate need of complimentary football rather than this, "One side will have to carry the other" Hell we've been in. Offense has to turn clock-killing drives into points and the defense has got to get off of the field on 3rd and long.

It's going to be a long season, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of $70M in cap space for next year and a full slate of draft picks (including MIN's 5th instead of CAR's original 7th). If Bryce looks more of the same then that first rounder is going directly to a QB. If he shows that the end of last season wasn't a mirage then BPA all day, every day.

To be fair, we are playing complimentary football. Both sides are trash and carrying us straight to the bottom.

[Icege]

1 minute ago, LinvilleGorge said:

To be fair, we are playing complimentary football. Both sides are trash and carrying us straight to the bottom.

I hate how true that is.

Edited 5 hours ago by Icege

[SmokinwithWilly]

1 minute ago, LinvilleGorge said:

To be fair, we are playing complimentary football. Both sides are trash and carrying us straight to the bottom.

This 3-4 is the death of our defense and has been since Tepper forced it on Ron. We've never had the personnel to implement it correctly and Evero isn't the coach to do it either. It takes years to move from a 4-3 to a 3-4 with good drafting, so with our FO, we should get there by 2194. 

[Bear Hands]

18 minutes ago, SmokinwithWilly said:

This 3-4 is the death of our defense and has been since Tepper forced it on Ron. We've never had the personnel to implement it correctly and Evero isn't the coach to do it either. It takes years to move from a 4-3 to a 3-4 with good drafting, so with our FO, we should get there by 2194. 

I dislike that this is the perception being made.  Some of the most successful defenses deploy a base 3-4.  And everything is very scheme fluid these days with how safety, nickel and LB roles have evolved over time.  I agree, it takes time, but we simply grabbed the wrong personnel.

It's not the 3-4, it's that we're playing a scheme without suitable LBs for deployment.  We don't get good enough edge setting at OLB and don't have the smart & alert ILB play. 

Compare to what Evero learned in.  That had Willis/Bowman...we had a guy in Jewell who knew how to do it and pretty well, not from Evero but straight from Vic.  The best we could find was Rozeboom and are trying to develop Trevin (threw him in with the wolves) which is not ideal.   Meanwhile, the vets at EDGE do not have the run stopping chops you expect.   

[Navy_football]

1 hour ago, LinvilleGorge said:

Are you kidding me? Two huge money OGs, the highest paid OT in football, a top 10 pick at LT, a top 10 pick at WR, another 1st round WR, a highly paid RB, an offensive minded head coach.

We've done everything we could to put Bryce in a position to succeed and that has left us strapped for resources on defense. I think that's the point of this thread and it's honestly probably a fair point.

And I should add that I'm not complaining about spending all those resources trying to surround Bryce with talent on offense. When you make the move we did to get Bryce you're all in. It would be dumb NOT to do everything you can at that point to make sure your investment pans out, unfortunately we dumped all our money into a meme coin that went belly up.

Linville... really?!

The OGs were an overreaction from 2023 when they played like 8 guys that will never play another meaningful snap in the NFL. But the others? 

Moton, Ickey and Chuba were in Carolina before Bryce. So they had nothing to do with him. Who was the #1 WR heading into 2024? After 2024, who was the #1 WR heading into 2025? I'm not saying they haven't put resources into the offense. I'm saying this narrative that the team is sacrificing the rest of the team to make BY look like an NFL QB is just... a bad take. They are trying to bring in and keep talent on a roster that was/is/TBD mostly void of NFL level players. 

Now if they would have gone out and overpayed/overdrafted for ex-Alabama players Bryce had chemistry with, then that would have been trying to make Bryce look good to the detriment of the team. 

[LinvilleGorge]

45 minutes ago, Bear Hands said:

I dislike that this is the perception being made.  Some of the most successful defenses deploy a base 3-4.  And everything is very scheme fluid these days with how safety, nickel and LB roles have evolved over time.  I agree, it takes time, but we simply grabbed the wrong personnel.

It's not the 3-4, it's that we're playing a scheme without suitable LBs for deployment.  We don't get good enough edge setting at OLB and don't have the smart & alert ILB play. 

Compare to what Evero learned in.  That had Willis/Bowman...we had a guy in Jewell who knew how to do it and pretty well, not from Evero but straight from Vic.  The best we could find was Rozeboom and are trying to develop Trevin (threw him in with the wolves) which is not ideal.   Meanwhile, the vets at EDGE do not have the run stopping chops you expect.   

Yeah, you can clearly build a good NFL defense with either scheme as the foundation. I personally prefer the 4-3 simply because I'm much more familiar with 4-3 concepts. Both schemes offer advantages and disadvantages. I feel like the main reason the 3-4 became prevalent is that 3-4 OLBs are easier to find than 4-3 DEs. Finding an elite 4-3 DE with the size to put his hand in the dirt every down and the bend to get around the edge is tough. It's easier to find a smaller guy who can stand up and covert speed to power. But then the 3-4 forces you to find an absolute unicorn in the form of the 3-4 NT who can hold up to constant double teams. Without a stud at NT you're really fighting an uphill battle.

[LinvilleGorge]

5 minutes ago, Navy_football said:

Linville... really?!

The OGs were an overreaction from 2023 when they played like 8 guys that will never play another meaningful snap in the NFL. But the others? 

Moton, Ickey and Chuba were in Carolina before Bryce. So they had nothing to do with him. Who was the #1 WR heading into 2024? After 2024, who was the #1 WR heading into 2025? I'm not saying they haven't put resources into the offense. I'm saying this narrative that the team is sacrificing the rest of the team to make BY look like an NFL QB is just... a bad take. They are trying to bring in and keep talent on a roster that was/is/TBD mostly void of NFL level players. 

Now if they would have gone out and overpayed/overdrafted for ex-Alabama players Bryce had chemistry with, then that would have been trying to make Bryce look good to the detriment of the team. 

I'm simply talking about the overall expenditure of resources on offense vs. defense which is the subject of the thread. We have a LOT more resources both in terms of cap space and in draft capital spent on offense vs. defense.

[SmokinwithWilly]

1 hour ago, Bear Hands said:

I dislike that this is the perception being made.  Some of the most successful defenses deploy a base 3-4.  And everything is very scheme fluid these days with how safety, nickel and LB roles have evolved over time.  I agree, it takes time, but we simply grabbed the wrong personnel.

It's not the 3-4, it's that we're playing a scheme without suitable LBs for deployment.  We don't get good enough edge setting at OLB and don't have the smart & alert ILB play. 

Compare to what Evero learned in.  That had Willis/Bowman...we had a guy in Jewell who knew how to do it and pretty well, not from Evero but straight from Vic.  The best we could find was Rozeboom and are trying to develop Trevin (threw him in with the wolves) which is not ideal.   Meanwhile, the vets at EDGE do not have the run stopping chops you expect.   

Im not saying there's anything wrong with the 3-4. Im saying we've done it wrong. When Tepper forced Ron to switch we didnt have the players to make the change and since then, we haven't been good at acquiring them. If youre going to lean into a scheme, lean into it. We kind of looked at it, but never fully committed and it shows. Now we've got this turd that is just awful. 

[SmokinwithWilly]

33 minutes ago, Navy_football said:

Linville... really?!

The OGs were an overreaction from 2023 when they played like 8 guys that will never play another meaningful snap in the NFL. But the others? 

Moton, Ickey and Chuba were in Carolina before Bryce. So they had nothing to do with him. Who was the #1 WR heading into 2024? After 2024, who was the #1 WR heading into 2025? I'm not saying they haven't put resources into the offense. I'm saying this narrative that the team is sacrificing the rest of the team to make BY look like an NFL QB is just... a bad take. They are trying to bring in and keep talent on a roster that was/is/TBD mostly void of NFL level players. 

Now if they would have gone out and overpayed/overdrafted for ex-Alabama players Bryce had chemistry with, then that would have been trying to make Bryce look good to the detriment of the team. 

I think the way they addressed the IOL was moronic. Many of us have been saying for years we needed to draft IOL and there have been plenty of high quality available for us to take, but instead we've taken fliers on guys with high RAS scores, raw potential, or athleticism that turned into the turd burgers that we all knew they would. We draft stupidly and we build stupidly. 

While we have spent more resources on offense than defense, we've wasted more on sheer ignorance than we've spent on either. 

[OldhamA]

4 hours ago, Icege said:

How does spending rankings determine sole fault?

Outside of the folks that want this to be exclusively Bryce Young's fault, most rational fans understand that the offense and defense combined for a stinker. Bryce didn't play well enough, Nijman didn't play well enough, Corbett didn't play well enough, Legette didn't play well enough, the TEs didn't play well enough, the entire defense minus the CBs didn't play well enough.

The only players that played well enough were TMac, Jaycee, Mike Jackson, Hunt, DLew, and Chuba.

Mainly because it's a QB driven league and our QB struggles to complete routine throws.

[OldhamA]

2 hours ago, Navy_football said:

This is getting out of hand again. I swear some of yall just look for reasons to call out the QB, in an extremely thinly vieled "OFFENSIVE CAP HIT" statement. 

All of that is offensive line. It was an overreaction to how horrible the guards were in 2023, where guys were starting multiple games that will never take a snap in the NFL again. Speaking of 2023... where did the offensive cap rank then? Where are those WRs playing in the league now? How much are the WRs, TEs and RBs making compared to the rest of the NFL?

We have two, 1st round WRs on the roster. And they are the only WRs on the roster picked before the 4th round. One shouldn't have been a first rounder, he's only in his second season, AND he was literally outplayed by an UDFA rookie WR last year - that is currently on IR. The other WR picked before the 4th round has only played one game as a pro. 

QB play needs to improve. Absolutely no friggin doubt about that. But, come on. That dude has not been dealt a fair hand, no matter how many ways you try to spin it. Let's hope he figures out how to make chicken salad out of the chicken poo this team has served him his entire time here. Hoping that this org finds another Cam Newton is not really a realistic expectation. 

'That dude' is about to make his 30th career start despite putting up horrific numbers.

Who else in NFL history has been handed that long a leash? 

[OldhamA]

13 minutes ago, SmokinwithWilly said:

I think the way they addressed the IOL was moronic. Many of us have been saying for years we needed to draft IOL and there have been plenty of high quality available for us to take, but instead we've taken fliers on guys with high RAS scores, raw potential, or athleticism that turned into the turd burgers that we all knew they would. We draft stupidly and we build stupidly. 

While we have spent more resources on offense than defense, we've wasted more on sheer ignorance than we've spent on either. 

They followed the Saints / Brees blueprint - short, slow QB so had to significantly strengthen the iOL to compensate.

It's worked - the OLine is incredibly good now. Sadly the short, slow QB isn't. 

[OldhamA]

4 hours ago, frankw said:

https://overthecap.com/positional-spending

We are 10th in offensive spending and 28th in defensive spending.

Much has been said about both sides of the ball in the last several days. Some want to blame the defense.

The numbers speak volumes.

Discuss.

Simply put, Evero has been shafted during his time here. The talent we left him to play with last season was criminal. They've invested some more into the D this offseason, but it's still a unit that's woefully short of talent. 

We should have let him walk in the offseason when he wanted to go. 

[Icege]

16 minutes ago, OldhamA said:

Mainly because it's a QB driven league and our QB struggles to complete routine throws.

It's a QB driven league, which means that all of the parts surrounding the QB have to be in order. No OL? QB isn't going to have time to throw or be able to hand it off. No weapons? Won't matter how well they play, can't catch it for them. Bad coaching? They're not the ones designing and calling plays.

Football is one of the ultimate team sports. All 11 players need to be in sync rather than one player being dominant (imo). Hell, even with Tom Brady, not a single one of his rings came without a top-10 defense on the other side of the ball or a top-10 OL in front of him.

I can understand people having lost patience with Bryce, especially starting off on the wrong foot for the third season in a row. That's not an issue. The issue I have is with folks being intentionally misleading and attempting to tell other posters what they're not allowed to talk about. Considering how often Red has claimed others have done this to him it is interesting at best, disingenuous at worst for him to turn around and do the same.