Saints at the top of Davante Adams’ wish list [Raiders trade Adams to Jets for conditional 3rd ; Jets paying Adams’ entire remaining salary]
Define “clean cap,” and look at what would have to be done to keep it “clean,” and tell me how much different that is compared to what we are doing now.
It all comes down to the coaches and players you choose, and we have failed miserably there. Football games aren’t won on financial budget spreadsheets.
Poor drafting and a (likely) bad decision at HC is what has us where we are, along of course with injuries. We literally signed the league’s highest paid free agent a year ago; finding money isn’t the problem, it’s what we are doing with it and who we are selecting that’s killing us.
Think of the cap as more of a never ending rolling five year budget accounting project rather than a one year/single season thing.
The five year budget accounting project where the big red number stays a big red number? I definitely agree the Saints have amplified their big red number problem with who they've signed. They've also continued to keep it a problem by doing things like handing out concerningly sized extensions to guys who are 30+.
Also I'm so done reposting the data that shows the Saints do just fine picking in the first and second rounds. They could do better in the third round but they also trade away their third round picks like crazy, personally I would like to see that stop. League wide success rate on fourth round picks signing a second contract is 30%. The average NFL career is 3.3 years. Any expectation to get even sustainable backups in the fourth round and later is unrealistic. That's like relying on scratchoff tickets to pay rent.
And yes, football games are won with the help of financial budget spreadsheets. Having a more manageable cap number would prevent things like picking Hendrickson or Williams, instead they'd be able to keep both. That's a situation where money matters. Keeping the prime talent they draft in house.
The Lions just lost Aiden Hutchinson to a terrible injury. They have the cap space to easily trade for Maxx Crosby if they want and Las Vegas agrees to it. Again, cap space keeps their options wide open. Next year the Lions have the cap space to not sweat losing any of their key free agents.
Now the Saints cap is also partially destroyed because of two freak injuries. CGM's career being ended by an ankle injury and Ram's career being ending by degenerative knee tissue is just awful. However if the Saints weren't as deep in the red as they were, these two injuries would have hurt the cap less.
The COVID year. Every team got hurt by the cap, but the Saints got crushed by it. Sure, no one saw it coming, but at the same time, if you're not wildly in the red every year, the unexpected hurts less.
The way the Saints operate gives them zero margin for error and injury in a sport filled with errors and injuries. They don't need to be one of those underspending teams with $50m in cap space during the season, but they also don't need to be a team with over $80m in red annually.