salary cap hell!

St. Geezy said
Oh I’m clearly very interested also, still doesn’t make it less annoying seeing people act like the Saints aren’t facing the same issues as other teams just with a different cosmetics.

You guys also have the benefit of hindsight. Just about everyone on this board was pumped about our roster going into 2023. The roster (and more so the coaches IMO) failed, so now you blame the salary cap for that.

You just aren't listening to what people are saying and keep trying to move the bar to the coaches and the players. I am saying that we have less recourse to fix roster problems because of the way we manage the cap. Pushing the money into multiple future years we can't predict instead of paying salaries year to year isn't a good strategy when done to the degree we're doing it. We have done it to the maximum and it has hurt the teams ability to improve the roster by subtraction.

Look at Ramczyk for example. He has a big contract and the cap hit for him was low during the first 3 years of the contract and the highest salaries and bonus numbers are coming due now. If we'd paid more of that upfront, we would be able to move off of his contract because we would already have paid him some of the guaranteed portions while he was still healthy. But he's not healthy, his knee is worn out and isn't getting better. He is currently going to account more than 10% of our cap number while he is in decline or even possibly unable to play. If we restructure him it will guarantee parts of his salary that are not guaranteed now. Which will only push his cap number higher in years he is even less likely to be playing. Who in their right mind is converting non-guaranteed salary to fully guaranteed bonuses for a player who could possibly never play again? Only the Saints are doing that and this is only one example of many. When the many contracts like this are taken all together, it's a huge mess with few good choices to make.

I know someone is going to say something like "you can never predict injuries, that's just bad luck" which is true. But you also don't have to leave so little flexibility that you can't deal with a problem like Ram, or Michael Thomas, or a potential problem with Lattimore, or AK's inevitable drop off. The NFL is too unpredictable to be planning for the cap 5 years out.