Let's talk salary cap
The Loomis/Hartley cap strategy was designed to keep a competitive roster together under Drew Brees - when year to year we were only a player or two away from staying competitive and contending.
The problem is that the Saints are seeing the negative side effects of that strategy with the lack of quality depth to fill spots.
Look at the number of quality depth we let walk in free agency - not because we didn’t want them but because we couldn’t afford them because of money tied up in prorated and protracted contracts.
Hendrickson, Anzalone, Williams, Ellis, Onyemata - just to name a few. Some of these guys may not have been in the long term plans anyway, but if you miss on a few draft picks and have to tie up a bunch of cap space for voidable year contracts, your depth really suffers.
That’s where we are today.
Talented week 1 team that got picked apart by the injury bug.
This is your interpretation of what it was designed for, repeated by fans so much that it is now called fact when in reality, all it is is low-hanging fruit for people to pick apart when things aren’t going well.
As Loomis said, this is way overblown. All we are doing is using future dollars instead of present dollars on a continuous clip. The Hendrickson/Williams fiasco was a direct result of COVID. I will admit, we got caught with our pants down there and it was not a foreseen circumstance.
Anzalone isn’t a fair person to name because he didn’t become “quality depth” worth keeping until he left us. None of us batted an eye at losing Anzalone, just like no one batted an eye when we left Baun walk.
Look, we aren’t the only team losing players in free agency, even teams with the so-called “healthy caps” are losing players left and right, and especially backup types like Ellis that want to get starter money. This isn’t some unique Saints problem.
In order to maintain the illusion of a healthy cap, there are still major restrictions and discipline measures you must take that are akin to ours, just in a different form, including not being able to cleanly break away from a 4 year $150 million contract you may now regret after year two without suffering greatly.
Our depth is bad because our player selection, and arguably our player development, has been poor, not because we weren’t able to spend tons of free agency money on depth. What in the world kind of depth do you think these other teams have to where they can withstand the types of injuries we have seen across the board with ease?
Most teams are top heavy, with cheap draft picks and free agents for depth, ours just aren’t working out mostly because of draft whiffs and a POTENTIAL player development gulf, and they certainly aren’t going to work out when half of the depth is on the field all at once; that goes for any team.
We could have done more this off-season if we wanted to, but Loomis said we are intentionally dialing back the strategy some, presumably to gear up for another crack at it later rather than right now, and now that fact is being used by members of the fanbase to say “See, it doesn’t work, we can’t sign anyone now.”