salary cap hell!
Settle down. I think you like to throw "straw man" out there because you think it makes you look smart. It doesn't. And we are not saying the same thing at all. The draft and cap management are unrelated. There is no cap strategy that will allow your team to be good if you draft poorly. There is also no draft success that excuses giving declining or injured players MORE guaranteed money to dig out your own past financial mistakes.
What drafting poorly does is make your team bad because you cannot restock the shelves with young players on cheap contract. What managing the cap poorly does is it makes your team bad because it limits your ability to do anything about it regardless of how you draft and leaves you with expensive declining players.
Sure, there is an occasional contract that teams regret, but they don't have rosters full of them? Ours didn't all start out as big money contracts. They started out as reasonable contracts that got restructured into bad contracts full of back loaded guaranteed money. Most teams give guys at Cam Jordans age and position 1 year deals for reasonable money. They aren't getting $13 million in guaranteed money with a $23 million cap hit from past restructures.
Why do I need to "settle down?" Who says I am not "settled." I am doing the exact same thing as you are, and responding to posts.
How is me pointing out your straw man making me look smart? You are just getting immature and silly now, making things personal just because I don't agree with you. If you don't like straw men getting pointed out, stop using them. If you don't know what a straw man is, go look it up. You do it all the time. If you don't like someone's take, you create a silly, exaggerated version of the take for that person to have to defend against. Saying I said anything close to "We have to hit on ALL draft picks for the strategy to be successful" is indeed the very definition of a straw man debate strategy. Again, if you don't like it being pointed out, stop doing it, because I am a person that does indeed point it out when someone is putting words into my mouth to strengthen their argument.
Agree...teams aren't giving guys Cam Jordan age big money deals...once again, we are definitely doing silly things with our cash, which is the problem.
My argument isn't that the GM and front office staff are perfect. I have said so many times that we suck at player evals and who we spend our money on. I am just saying that the strategy itself isn't effecting who we pick to pay or draft. The strategy itself didn't make us go out and sign the highest APY contract on the market and give it to possibly the wrong guy in Carr. The strategy didn't make us go out and give an older Jordan a big money deal for the sake of it. The strategy didn't make us go out and draft a likely bust in Penning, among many others. The strategy didn't make us go out and get a bad eval on a RB that ended up averaging less than three yards per carry for us. The strategy didn't force us to overdraft a LT that appears to be one of the worst players on the team or give up two firsts for a DE that doesn't love football. The strategy didn't force us to promote Dennis Allen or make Pete Carmichael Jr. our play-caller.
These are the things killing us, not "the strategy."