Saints restructure Ramczyk to vet minimum per Jason Fitzgerald of Over The Cap
You have been a big defender of our cap strategy and that is obviously your prerogative. But I, and a whole lot of other people on here, simply won't ever agree with you on this. A certain amount of guaranteed money at signing is what it takes to get deals done in many cases. But this team has a really ugly habit of doling out even more guaranteed money into void years and they do it annually. This makes it far more difficult to move on from players that no longer perform or fit what you're trying to do. It also makes it hard to move on from players that aren't happy and causing problems. The 5 year cap outlook that you're talking about completely guts the year to year adjustments that sometimes need to be made. That's not a big deal when the team is good and everyone is healthy, excelling and happy. But it's a nightmare when the team is bad and injured with players not meeting expectations or unhappy because if you're set for 5 years and recognize something needs to be done 2 years in, it takes 3 more years to pivot. To me that's just bad management.
I think I am less of a “defender” of it in a vacuum and more of a guy that sees it as merely a different, more eye-catching version of the same problems everyone faces.
The problem with our system is that if you are up against the cap and go to bat and miss on a player, you have to live with a player you don’t want for an extra year or two. You have “borrowed from the future,” to help your present, and eventually that time and space has to be accounted for, whether it’s dead money or holding onto a player you would have never gotten in the first place for an extra year.
The problem with a “healthy cap” team that is up against the cap is they never sign that player in the first place. Or if they do have the space to sign them and they miss, they have a huge cap hit but aren’t willing to make moves to mitigate it because they have to keep their cap “healthy.”
I see your side’s argument for sure, don’t get me wrong, but I think ultimately there are consequences anytime you sign players to significant deals that you end up regretting, then compound it by not drafting well, staying healthy, and having competent coaching.
I am not trying to sell this as some huge advantage but more so as something that offers us a little more flexibility to make moves we deem necessary within the confines of the five year outlook prism rather than on being anal about keeping the books clean.
It’s easy for us to point to the Carr contract as something to hate, but the bottom line is the accounting system is what allowed us to sign a guy to a contract like that in the first place. It’s too bad it didn’t work out the way we hoped though, so now we pay the piper by (likely) keeping him around a year longer with an inflated number.
We agree more than you think, but I am more so in the “Blame the football people, not the accounting people that were told by the football people what they needed done” mindset.
I do see your pivot flexibility point 100%, but the pivoting will be pointless if you’re still making the same bad football judgment decisions.
I see the cap as more of a pesky accounting project to make your football decisions you’ve made work rather than an actual hinderance.