salary cap hell!

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.

I am indeed listening, I just don’t agree. I firmly feel if we hadn’t whiffed on so many picks and acquisitions and had better coaching, we’d be a better football team.

You can scream to the top of your lungs, but my position will always remain that it’s player personnel and coaching personnel errors that have us where we are, not cap management techniques.

Cap management has become the easy target in hindsight only after the player acquisitions (and seemingly, the coaches) didn’t work out.

In your opinion we are in cap hell, but we are only in so-called cap hell because we maximized the cap. The problem is we maximized it with the wrong people.