Cap affect of paying as you go vs pushing out and having dead space

[RashanGary]

Here's the bottom line. A team needs to stretch the cap a bit WHEN THEY HAVE TALENT ON ROSTER. Its fine to make sure you lock up players who are successful in your system and extend windows. My gripe is thinking you can pay every FA on the market and buy championships. It doesn't work for a variety of reasons. And when you get carried away with it you end up with a cap situation that forces you to jettison valuable talent. 5-6 years from now, aprh and assuming progression rather than regression we will have a lot of talent up for contracts. I have no problem stretching the cap to keep them. An occasional FA signing to fill a hole even makes sense. However the Smith contracts went 50%. Turner ended up costing us for an average player. I forget who the 4th signing was that year which leads me to believe it cost us. Maybe not, I don't recall.

We tried to buy a title and came up short. Then we way overpayed our QB because he was upset. We won't be clear of that issue until after next year, but we really could use a FA safety this year. You can kick the cap, but there are limitations.

Yes. With the attention spans of people (me included) it’s hard to get people to invest time reading the amount of words it would take to explain a bunch of the factors. Unless they’re a proven professional, you just don’t want to spend the energy reading some fans opinion.

But, right.

Adrian Amos was the 4th and nobody wants to keep him for some reason, so he can’t be that good. Maybe it’s personality because his play seemed fine.


When you draft a guy, you have his whole medical history from 4 years in the NFL. You know what kind of guy he is. You know what his assignments were so you have a better gauge on his play. It always looks scary when someone puts their hand in a lions mouth, but when you raised the little guy, you have enough information to make an informed decision on whether it’s safe to put your hand in his mouth.

Huge contracts that go bad for a GM are about as bad for your career as getting your arm chewed off by a Lion is for your physical health. You better be sure Simba has your best interest before you start letting him playfully chew your forearm.


So, was Ted a coward who wouldn’t spend in UFA or was he the guy holding the camera while his buddies got their arms chewed off petting the lions through the cage at the zoo? The world may never know.

But whether the world knows or not, I agree. UFA is dangerous. Not the kind of dangerous where you call your buddy a pussy for chickening out, but the kind of dangerous where maybe you get your arm chewed off. I’d rather be holding the camera.