Mike Florio bringing the proper perspective to our organization: “Saints are a solid long-term destination for a new coach“

texasjefe said
Hey, really digging your specificity on the numbers on your cap posts. And your recent post where you posited taking Carr's dead cap impact now with him removed from the roster was instructive.

The cap itself is not that interesting to me. They have to be under the cap on league year day one and so it's the fallout I pay attention to.

2025 is going to be fat dead cap year. 2026 is unknown, as nothing can rollover yet if I understand it. I don't think 2026 will be pretty either but that's to your point of taking the Carr full dumper now, not spread out.

The fallout you talked about should always be fallout we desire. Like if a player is cut or traded, it shouldn't be to get under the cap. It should be because we want to improve on the position or cut bait on a prior bad decision. And those bad decisions happen to EVERY GM, Loomis included. What doesn't usually happen to other GMs is getting stuck with really bad contracts that they have no maneuverability to get out of and the only option is to double down on it. We've been doing that and we need to get back the flexibility to take a one year hit and be done with it.

The other thing we should be excited for annually is the possibility of adding free agents on normal contracts that'll help the team win. Carr's contract was immediately suspect. There was no real competition for him and he had been cut by his prior team. We signed him to the only contract we could which on it's surface seemed reasonable being back loaded with a big signing bonus and only $60 million guaranteed. It was a base salary of $1.5 million in 2023 and $30 million in 2024. But we knew we had no room for the $30 million in 2024. So year two came and we had to convert his salary to even more back loaded guaranteed money. If we don't cut him now, we'll do the same thing again next month and add yet another $30 million to the eventually dead money.

There are mechanisms to clean this up. But it doesn't coincide with the team being very good in the short term. The good news is we weren't going to be good anyway, so this should be the time to take our lumps and get things cleaned up for our next coach to have a fighting chance. We will know in short order whether Loomis is ready to do it. I hope he is.