Yet we have one of the best teams in the NFL present and future, and we're moderately active in free agency getting help where it's needed.
Yet we have one of the best teams in the NFL present and future, and we're moderately active in free agency getting help where it's needed.
What could be more GOOD and NORMAL and AMERICAN than Packer Football?
We made a tough decision to cut Jones so we could make some important free agent moves. If not for all that dead cap, we could have kept Jones at his old salary and still signed even more free agents, or used the cap space to lock up Love early.
I'm not saying pushing cap out is always bad, but it has real consequences.
What you can do isn't necessarily what it's smart to do. Paying Jones $12 million for whatever percentage of the season he will likely be available probably would not have been smart.
What could be more GOOD and NORMAL and AMERICAN than Packer Football?
I think that Gutey has shown the best way of limit the negative after effects of "going all in" is to draft exceptionally well so that you have a deep well of exciting talent on 1st and 2nd year contracts.
That's the picture that is starting to paint itself, and I'm getting really excited to see where this line of thinking takes us. If I'm the rest of teh entire NFL, I'm paying very close attention to what Gute has done almost from the very beginning (but certainly since 2020) and studying this strategy and where it is leading. I'm stsrting to think that he's creating a model for team-building that may become the new gold standard for the entire league - the GM equivalent of Bill Walsh's West Coast Offense.Originally Posted by Sparkey
The more I see this guy work, the more I like him. I'm really excited about where this is going.
I don't know it's so much about any special strategy. It's just good results. After all, isn't ever team trying to draft exceptionally well?
Exactly. How is "doing a reallty great job" a strategy?
Guter has drafted very well the last couple of years. Before that, he was spotty. And sometimes crummy. The real question is, what is different that he's drafted much better recently? Has he changed something in his approach, have they hired different people, or is it maybe just luck?
"The Devine era is actually worse than you remember if you go back and look at it."
KYPack
Luck
STOP MAKING SENSE!!! Culo rat indeed.
I don't hold Grudges. It's counterproductive.
but GMs are just people. They get stuck in their opinions and don't change much. Same as owners groups which is why some teams stagnate for decades. I won a fantasy baseball auction last year by basically buying the best 4 OFs (one at DH). Every other team was hamstrung at the position because its so thin. We just had our auction. The same 11 guys I beat used similar strategies to last year as did I. They didn't adapt their strategy at all. I'm not convinced NFL GMs are watching Gutes....they are more likely explaining to their bosses that he got lucky landing Love.
I don't hold Grudges. It's counterproductive.
Gutekunst seems to like to add FA's that have 4 years or less of experience. Then also hit that same position in the draft. It is a smart philosophy because that 4 year vet Fa will probably get you 3 good years at best. That aligns with the draft/develop strategy of TT in the past where guys might take a year or 2 before they are ready to help the team. Based on his FA signings, I expect a Safety and RB in the early rounds this draft. Also based on Gutes previous drafts I estimate that he will draft at least two offensive linemen within the first 5 rounds.
First round seems to always be the best athlete with long term upside at an impact position. Rounds 2 & 3 focus on the double down strategy mentioned above and 4 thru 6 to adding competition/depth where needed.
Obviously, if you suck at drafting then the whole philosophy means nothing and injuries will screw up even the best laid plans. In relation to the cap, it also provides a team with the ability to avoid that 3rd year contract that most of the time does not work out for the team.
Last years draft looks like a homerun. If he can somehow pull off another draft like 23, The team will be setup for a big stretch of great football.
I couldn't let this fade away without commenting on it!
Trying to prove either side of this argument with just a couple theoretical contract scenarios never really works; the opposite side can always say, "But,... blah, blah, blah." So, instead of examples, I will simply state my conclusions from following what has actually happened over the past thirty years that the cap has existed. As some of you may remember, I followed the cap very closely long before "OverTheCap" "Sportrac" and others existed. I kept notes about Packer players contract details when they were published, because finding the information 6 mos later was next to impossible. I found, printed, and actually read the bargaining agreements going way back, and could answer salary cap questions back in the days of the Journal-Sentinel fan site long before Packerrats and its immediate predecessor existed.
- Contrary to what some have implied, for the most part GB has been conservative in it's cap management approach. Gute wandered from that starting a few years ago, but I think he is finding his way back. (The subject of another thread I will start in the next day or so.)
- GB has been innovative in finding ways to use the cap conservatively. Others followed, and in some instances salary cap rules were changed because of it.
- Can the cap be "cooked"? Sure, but that doesn't mean it should be routinely.
- Salary cap carelessness tends to be cumulative. Like tolerance stacking in machine structures, any one individual deviation can be tolerable, but the combined impact of numerous deviations can cause difficulties. The solution is never "more of the same". You must compensate or correct.
- GB was in such a correction last year and is again this year. They have made a lot of decisions necessitated by the salary cap situations. By and large these were decisions to rely on many more inexperienced players than a team competing for playoffs will do intentionally. Normally, as a result, this team would have been crap last year. With just average drafts it would have been bad. Fortunately for them they put together back-to-back rookie groups the likes of which I do not think I have ever seen. They essentially replaced 2/3 of their front-line players in just two drafts. They found capable players, more than just stop gaps. They didn't hit back-to-back homeruns, they hit consecutive grand slams in the drafts of 2022 and 2023; or so it seems.
- But for the vast number of first contract players performing much, much better than anyone could reasonably expect, salary cap hell would have been a real experience for a couple years in GB.
As with most things in life, there is no single, hard-fast best way to go. It requires a mixture. However:
- "Pay as you go" retains flexibility. You can adjust contracts, cut or release players or extend players based on merit. You have maximum flexibility to "cook the cap" in the future if you so desire.
- Routinely pushing out massive amounts for players contracts inhibits flexibility. Players are kept for an extra year, sometimes two, because taking the cap hit is simply unmanageable even if it is affordable. This ties up a roster spot. GB has been in the situation where dead cap hits combined with insufficient adjustable contracts for other players required them to allow good players to walk away in free agency. "Cooking the cap" generally requires contracts to cook if you want to bring in more players. Contracts already cooked can not be recooked until next year.
- Unforseen circumstances happen all the time with players, injuries and attitude are just two. If you continually use tomorrows cap to account for today's players, too often you have to double up, accounting for both yeaterdays player and a required portion of today's player. It becomes a management nightmare.
If you push guaranteed money into the future so you can spend more now, you have less to spend later. Worse, you might have to carry the non guaranteed portion of a player longer (can't trade or cut) than you want because you cannot accelerate their large future cap hit to this year. The summary is pushing large amounts of cap hits into the future means less flexibility and you will sometimes end up paying more, never less.
I think most everyone would agree that the Packers have generally been on the conservative side when it comes to aggressive cap maneuvers.
Is this one of the elements you're going to go into in greater detail a little later?
Seriously? a big hell no to that! Maybe it was that way with Ted Thompson, but with Gutekunst, the Packers have done about as good a job of pushing the cap to the limit as anybody, hence the success we've seen.
What could be more GOOD and NORMAL and AMERICAN than Packer Football?
Probably not, so I'll discuss here.Is this one of the elements you're going to go into in greater detail a little later?
- In the early years of the salary cap, unused salary cap was "lost". It did not roll over from year to year.
- In calculating salary cap allocations, performance bonuses paid at the conclusion of the season were categorized as either "likely to be earned" or "not likely to be earned". Statistical categories included as "likely to be earned" were defined for the various position groups.
- A "likely to be earned" bonus counted against the salary cap of the year in which it could be earned. A "not likely to be earned" bonus did not have to be accounted for until the salary cap of the following year.
- If a "likely to be earned" bonus was not, in fact, earned, since it had been counted against the salary cap of the year in which it could have been but wasn't earned, the team received a credit for the bonus amount in the salary cap of the following year.
With that in mind, GB and I believe the Eagles were the first to revise contracts for one or two players each year to include bonuses within the category of "likely to be earned", but for players who would not earn them. These revised contracts were signed in the last couple weeks of the seasons. For example, with two weeks left in the season, the backup QB, who had not yet played, would be given a revised contract including a bonus for games played or pass attempts which could not be earned in the games remaining. The bonus amount would be most of their remaining salary cap that year. The player usually received a small signing bonus for cooperating.
In this way, the salary cap was "used" that year, but since the player wouldn't actually earn the bonus, GB received a credit against the cap the following year. In effect, they rolled unused cap from one year to the next.
Surprisingly, other teams were slow to follow this practice. A few did, but not a lot of them for quite a few years. Gradually they did, and eventually the league gave in, and allowed rollover of unused cap without the sham bonuses. It went through some goofy variations to get where it is today.
So we can discuss intelligently, what do you mean by "pushing the cap to the limit"?
Under Thompson, I think they also banked cap space by signing front loaded contracts with lower cap hits in later years.
I'm not a big fan of this happening year after year. It suggests your under utilizing free agency and leaving potential improvements to the team on the table.
Good luck!
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