With the 9th Pick in the 2025 draft, who should the Saints select? (merged)

Understood, but if you start a worse player because he makes more, the team is doomed.

Competition for starting positions should determine who is on the field and who is on the bench.

Definitely agree on that. The issue is that what happens is that the team won’t go out of its way to find a better player to trump a player whose salary is that high.

Now, if they happen to stumble upon a cheap free agent that suddenly has a light bulb come on and gets great, or get lucky and strike gold on an immediate Pro Bowl level rookie guard out of Bloomsberg College that you got in the middle of the draft, that’s a different story.