Chase Young looks undisciplined
No squabbles, friendly disagreements. We are able to do what you're saying. I just don't think it's smart. Players get hurt, players decline, players don't fit the scheme like you think they will, you get new coaches that want different players, etc. Then you are stuck with those players or have to take on a ton of dead money. When void years are involved it makes the price tag even larger.
Doing this once in a while for a player when they don't quite fit under the cap when it's close is one thing. Doing it when you just had to clear $60 mil of cap by doing the exact same thing with guys already on your roster is just dumb. Maybe it seems smart if you're a top 5 team, it definitely doesn't when you're a bottom 5 team.
What if it is our mere perception that we are doing this for players we no longer want but in reality the team still views Demario Davis as a guy they want starting, Cam Jordan and Tyrann Mathieu still having roles to some degree, etc.? Most of the restructures we're doing, to me, are for guys we plan to have anyway.
I have noticed we have started using void years a lot more as well rather than just straight relying on restructures, so that should help us to pull from future years a little more cleanly and that should help us to be able to release players when we want to more often.
This upcoming year, we can clear nearly $100m in salaries to bring us close to $40m under simply via a small handful of restructures to be able to stack more players on top of what we have. That's without cutting anyone, and $40m is ample space to add some good talent to the roster, which should be healthy come training camp.
I don't think we are so far away that abandoning the strategy altogether needs to be on the table. And, as I indicated before, I am not really sure if it is really even some advantageous "strategy," it is just a different way of doing things that looks different on paper.
The Derek Carr contract probably is the one that has screwed us though. Even though I do like him as a QB despite what others think, we likely should not have splurged like that on a player of his ilk.
Sorry for rambling a bit.