kungfoodude

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.

I think you are spinning a much wilder conspiracy than actually exists. McVay is leaving because of personal reasons and I am sure the specter of rebuilding doesn't attract him either. But....most NFL teams go through rebuilding. If you are smart and do things well, you can also stay competitive during those rebuilds. How many successive rebuilds have the Steelers and Pats gone through while still being winning teams? You can't spend like a drunken sailor or make a bunch of bad decisions on personnel. THAT is where you create trouble. Having unproductive players on the books that you have to jettison or suffer through. THAT is how you can fail at this. Other than that, the cap is literally not a concern. We can retool a BUNCH of our current contracts to keep making space and kicking that can. All the while, we can pay out big lump sums to the players which makes them happy. So, you really don't need to be worried about the cap. Hurney is gone and we actually have people in the building that understand how to play these tricks.

You may not remember this clip but this explains some of what is going on.

See my reply in the other thread. The cap is basically no longer a real concern. It's just a shell game. And we did hire people smart enough to finally play it.

This is the modern NFL era where the cap isn't real. We can restructure basically forever and kick the can basically forever. This is quite literally the new way to handle that. Especially with the cap expected to skyrocket in the next few seasons. It isn't just the Saints that do this. It's the norm.

Well being bad at evaluation isn't going to work no matter how many picks you have. Remember, you don't fill ALL your needs through the draft. There is free agency. The draft is about injecting cheap and hopefully capable talent to build the core of the team. We should(and probably have) been adding DL and OL in just about every draft class. Those are two of the biggest positional groups on any team.

We would be smart to draft Corbett's eventual replacement. Frankly, since we have a good OL, we should be drafting at least 1 OL just about every year to develop. Our depth is still thin, so this just makes sense.

Yeah, that is a literal nightmare scenario. Any individual portion could be digestible, to a point. All three? JFC

I don't think fans were pounding for him as much as that owner was.

I sincerely hope you are wrong.

Eh.....I think we need to be careful about fixating too heavily on the "local guy" aspect. We have gotten ourselves in trouble a lot of times banking too heavily on that in players and coaches. Those are always cool stories but the reality is that rarely matters on the field. In the community it is usually fantastic.

I am 1000% confident he is trash but I am not confident that there aren't dumbass teams in the NFL. After all, look at what we traded for the bum.

The phone is fine but it is wonky. Even with ad blockers it is very buggy.