Elvis' 2025 cap and roster cleanup proposal (13 Viewers)

[Elvis]

I think we need to move off Carr, whether that’s via trade or release. Carr is not the long term answer at QB, I know that, Kellen knows that, Mickey knows that, and this fan base knows that. Kellen needs to be able to see what he has in Spencer and/or Jake before a VERY good QB class coming in the 2026 draft. I will do two separate scenarios I would want, one being Carr trade, the other Carr release.

Trade:
Carr to Jets for a 5th and 6th round pick. He gets to go back with Adams and they get a stopgap QB. Saves $11,326,000
$40,767,813 over the cap

Restructures:
Cam: Saves $9,328,000
McCoy: Saves $6,744,000
Davis: Saves $5,928,000
Ruiz: Saves $6,384,000
Granderson: Saves $5,248,000
Mathieu: Saves $4,328,000
Shepard: Saves $2,904,000
Werner: Saves $2,520,000
$2,616,187 below the cap

Re-sign:
Young: 3 year 36 million. Lower his cap hit to around $5,000,000
Juwaun: 2 year 10 million. Lower his cap hit to around $2,000,000
$11,116,187 below the cap

Extension:
Olave: Lower his cap hit by $2,000,000
Foster: Lower his cap hit by $2,000,000
$15,116,187 below the cap

This is where I stop. We don't touch Taysom’s contract unless we have to (hopefully he takes a pay cut). If we need extra space we can gain an additional $10,250,000 cutting him after June 1st giving us a total of $25,000,000 in cap space to work with to sign draft picks and minimum/low salary players to round out the roster.

For a Carr June 1 designation, I would do everything above the same, expect I wouldn’t touch Cam’s contract, and we would just carry around 5 million in cap space until we get to June 1st where we would gain 30 million.

With these moves listed above we start the 2026 offseason with $75,136,375 in cap space, minus whatever the new extensions are. This is assuming all money in restructures are just pushed to 2026, it would likely be more.

In this scenario we get two extra draft picks in the back side of the draft, take every penny of Carr’s dead cap hit this season, and still gain around $25,000,000 in cap space, which is around what we have been operating with every season lately. Next year we can cut anybody of the older restructured players we want without cutting into any cap space, we would still have that $75,000,000 no matter if we cut all 3 of Cam, DD and Tyrann

This is great. It is another alternative way to get out from under Carr's contract. I still prefer my method because it gives us more eventual cap space that we'll need for the rookie draft class and splits Cam's and Carr's cap hits between 2025 and 2026. But your way would allow us to sign players immediately.

Either way, I appreciate your efforts in showing another way.

 

[DSnfla]

I know this will be controversial to some and we won't all agree that this is the way things should be done. This is what I would do to manage the roster and cap situation as the team enters a new era with a new head coach. I believe it's time to clean up the mess that was created over the last 5 or so years and give the next coach the quickest path to a clean slate to show us what he's got. None of this solves ALL of the problems. All I ask is that if you disagree, tell us what you would do to clean things up. If you like where we are, then this thread is probably not for you.

I am starting without touching the contracts of Carr, Cam Jordan or Ramczyk. We can get to within $10.25 million of cap compliant by restructuring some players and cutting only a couple of players. Many of the restructured players are under 30 years or are players we are likely to keep because of salary guarantees in 2025 anyway. The cuts I’ve listed just make sense as under performing players and the additional options listed below are to tackle the remaining $10.25 million.

Restructures

Player (Restructure Cap Savings, Already Guaranteed $ in 2025)

Erik McCoy ($8.43m, $0)
Demario Davis ($5.25m, $4,25)
Cesar Ruiz ($7.98m, $9.15m)
Carl Grandson ($6.56m, $7.73m)
Tyrann Mathieu ($5m, $1m)
Alvin Kamara ($1.735m, $3m)
Pete Werner ($3m, $4.25m)
Foster Moreau ($2.734m, $0)
Khaled Saunders ($2.23m, $0)
Rashid Shaheed ($3.1m, $0)
JT Gray ($1.345m, $0)

Cuts

Player (Cap Savings)

Jamal Williams ($1.23m)
Cedrick Wilson ($2.4m)

Additional options to get to cap compliance

The below options would be used in combination with each other to lower the rest of the $10.25m of negative cap by the deadline.

Player (mechanism for lowering cap)

Taysom Hill (pay cut)
Cameron Jordan (pay cut, if not released with a June 1 designation)
Alontae Taylor (extension with low first year $)
Rashid Shaheed (extension with low first year $, would replace his restructure from above)
Chris Olave (extension with low first year $)
Nathan Shepherd (cut or restructure)
Chase Young (re-sign to extension to lower 2025 dead $ hit)
Juwan Johnson (re-sign to extension to lower 2025 dead $ hit)
Various bottom of the roster players (cut)
______________________________________________________________________

The hypothetical additional moves I chose were:

1. Extend Juwan on a 3 year $14.2m deal with $7.2 in guarantees. That lowers his 2025 cap hit from $6.5 to $3.825. I don’t love this, but something had to be done.

2. Restructure Nathan Shepherd saving $3m.

3. Taysom pay cut to $5m. He’s 35 and isn’t going to be available for camp and won’t be able to sign to another team until healthy if he was cut. $5 guaranteed is better than nothing guaranteed.

These along with the other moves above gets us under by about $500k by the deadline without having touched Carr, Jordan or Ramczyk allowing for June 1st designations for Carr and Cam while remaining cap compliant. When June 1 hits, $42.7 million in cap comes back to sign new players. Overthecap shows there would be $88.4m of cap space in 2026, but I think there is an error in that it doesn’t show the increase from 2025 restructures in accelerated bonuses from void years as dead money, so it won’t be that high. But I don’t think we’ll be in the hole either.

This sets us up for much less cap juggling in the future though 2026 will have these restructures hit the books as dead money, they will be paid for by what we will save in not having Carr’s 2026 contract not being on the books and taking part of his hit in 2025.

Since you have very specific requests in this thread I won't go into why I disagree with what you're trying to do, and why I don't think this is the way to go. I'll just post this from Nick Underhill and say I agree with his assessment on the way to go with the Carr situation. It starts about the 28:42 mark

 

[St. Geezy]

Since you have very specific requests in this thread I won't go into why I disagree with what you're trying to do, and why I don't think this is the way to go. I'll just post this from Nick Underhill and say I agree with his assessment on the way to go with the Carr situation. It starts about the 28:42 mark

Great clip, thanks for posting. They really articulated my thoughts as well.

Just doesn’t seem feasible, and it’s not like the guy has been so egregiously bad that we need to be so desperate to get rid of him to the point where we should be willing to sacrifice a season/time to do it.

The cap is set to reset on its own over the next two years; just roll with Carr this year and like Trip said, “Give it one last hurrah” with this core group.