salary cap hell!
I don’t think you get what we are saying, yes the Saints signed Carr to big money contract. And now it looks like they will restructure his contract. Let’s say that Carr bombs, stinks it up or the Saints just decide he is not their future, do you think we would be able to release or trade him after next season? The answer is no, if he is restructured. The cap money kicked down the road would be too large to deal with in one fiscal year. Can we trade him? Again no, for the same reason. The money you pay a player today in the form of a signing bonus and spread throughout the contract, will be due at some point. It just a bad way to run a franchise long term. You’re handcuffing your franchise and you have to be right on all those players being what you expect (Mike Thomas). I would guess the Saints are 4 or 5 years away from being a legit contender with our “cap hell” if they draft well. So you’re looking at the 2028 or 2029 season. And every year they play the restructure game it delays us another year. You’re just delaying the inevitable.
We need to get out of these bad contracts/restructures. Purge the older players. We won’t be contenders during this process anyway. Save draft capital and draft well.
You are limited to two post-June 1 transactions per year. That limits them.
Carr's cap number was $7.2 million in 2024 and now we have to deal with it because his 2025 cap number is $35.7 million. Mathieu and Maye were both less than $3.5 million on the first year cap and are ballooning now. Maye, who we don't need anymore, will cost $8.4 million in dead money to cut because of 3 void years because most of his contract was more guaranteed prorated bonuses than salary. If Ram were to retire tomorrow, we'd have $32 million in dead money.
Like I said, we are limited by the back loaded and constantly restructured contracts. The salaries balloon at the end and we can't cut them because if we did the void year bonuses would accelerate and cost more than another restructure.
What teams are signing big money QBs or a player at any position to a big money long term deal and cutting them after one year?
The only reason this seems like a Saints problem is because we intentionally structured his deal this way so that we could afford him.
Teams not in our position are signing them to deals with more upfront money, and it would be just as cost prohibitive for them to cut the player also, especially if they want to maintain having a so-called “good” cap situation.
Too many people act like the Saints are the only team facing these issues and like if we did things the traditional way, the same problems wouldn’t exist just in a different form.
Our main problem has been WHO we are giving our money to and who we are drafting, not our finances.
You guys just can’t see that we are doing the same thing with similar restrictions as everyone else, just using future cash rather than present cash.
You get too big-eyed when seeing the fat negative on OTC at the beginning of each off-season. That’s Monopoly money figures, fake, and OTC has no clue what the team has planned already to remedy it, literally EVERY SINGLE YEAR.
If us signing the league’s highest paid free agent last year despite going into the off-season under similar circumstances wasn’t proof enough to you, then I don’t know what else to say.
We are not the only team stuck in bad contracts, we are not the only team with assets we can’t trade, and we are not the only team that sees free agents sign elsewhere. We are doing the same thing as everyone, just in a different, more complex form.