WhoKnows

Iky looked bad because he was awful on the edge when he had 1 well known guy to block. Anyone with speed just ran right by him. The LG had nothing to do with that. I don’t recall seeing Moton looking bad like that all the time. Also, I recall seeing times where the LG picked up the stunt coming from Iky’s guy and Iky never got off the double to pick up the inside DL stunting to the outside. He was really bad at any stunts and reading the right guy to pick up. Our interior OL was wretched but Iky looked just as bad all on his own.

Then it’s on the GM/assistant GM to know that and make the trade, don’t you think? Listen, Fitterer and his assistant made a poo ton of mistakes. You don’t have to cover for Morgan. That’s why a lot of us were concerned when he was hired as the GM. He may figure it out and do well but you don’t have to try and paint it like someone else dropped the ball on Burns. Fitterer and Morgan did, simple as that. They should have made the trade, but barring that they should have already had a deal in place if they turn down the trade.

What? Morgan and Fitterer were the assistant GM and GM. Souleman(sp?) was the cap guy but he make the decision. Morgan/Fitt were 100% at fault for not realizing the Rams trade value plus opening up Burns’ cap space was a great deal and they were 100% at fault for not having an extension already setup. I’d be interested in what you think the GM’s job is.

Trading away 2 picks that could very easily end up being two young solid WRs for a guy who wants a big deal makes no sense. If this was a shitty WR draft and we weren’t completely rebuilding, maybe. Right now, with this draft, completely stupid. This draft reminds me of 2020 when Higgins went 33rd and Pittman was 34th right behind him. Lamb and Jefferson went in the first but Ruggs, Jeudy and Raegor all went before Jefferson. We have to hit on 33 and 39, but the WR talent in this draft is such that you could possibly come away with both Higgins and Pittman. Then again, we could get Shenault, Hamler, Claypool and Van Jefferson, the next 4 WRs taken in that 2nd round.

Man, the Bears really fleeced us bad. They had to be dancing a jig when they saw what we looked like in preseason and probably doing it again watching us not field a defense. I don’t think Moore and our two future picks could have worked out any better for them. Pick value (ignoring year since we are both rebuilding so only talent matters) was 3000 for us and 5230 for them. Then you throw DJ Moore on top. Damn Fitterer. Add in his, I’d rather have a 5th than two 1sts (2nds cancel) for Burns and we basically burned 3 1st round picks for nothing.

I understand your thoughts about a 2025 first. I might have preferred that but I will say that you shouldn’t forget that this is a loaded draft. A late first in 2025 might actually not be as good a player as pick 39. That said, it would have been nice to have extra picks (like the Rams first) and our #1 overall.

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.