Saints restructure Ramczyk to vet minimum per Jason Fitzgerald of Over The Cap (13 Viewers)

[Rouxble]

ok let me get this straight are you saying, when we restructure, we end up paying a sort of interest on top? 14.1 vs 12+12+11 (34.5) Diff of 21.3M extra?

Not paying any interest, we are just paying the cap charges that we pushed from earlier contract years by converting base salaries to restructuring bonuses.

 

[St. Widge]

So this was a bad decision, no? But Loomis was "forced" to restructure Ram due to the messy cap situation the team was already in, a situation of his creation. Basically, I'm done letting Loomis off the hook (not that anyone here is doing that). I'm no cap expert but I feel like Loomis has not taken enough heat for his cap negligence. Would love for some ex-GM cap expert to do a story about the current Saints cap situation (by far the worst in the league) and contract decisions of the last few years because as it stands, it is hard for me, a cap novice, to understand just how bad things have been.

Loomis has taken plenty of heat for what he has done with the cap here and all over the internet. Practically every thread on this board has at least one post about firing Loomis regardless of the topic.

He deserves most if not all of it. But, he does appear to be working on getting it back to normal by the end of the 2026 season. It's going to take some time to fix it and because of the way it was done, it will require some restructures to get cap compliant for the next couple years. You can't just stop doing it all of a sudden. It takes time to change the way you do things.

That being said, the biggest issue for this team is not drafting well enough since 2017, bad coaching since 2021, and bad evaluation of which players to keep and which to let go, i.e. Hendrickson vs. Williams, Baun and Ellis vs. Werner. If they drafted better and kept the right players, the cap situation wouldn't be as big of a deal. You can't buy a championship with cap space, but you can win one by drafting well and coaching well.

 

[Rexman100]

Not paying any interest, we are just paying the cap charges that we pushed from earlier contract years by converting base salaries to restructuring bonuses.

oh i see. You're saying if we played it correctly without kicking the can, we'd be in a situation where we could just eat 14M and be done. Instead of where we are, which adds additional years.

 

[St. Geezy]

The point is more about the cap dollars, and most teams don't kick the can down the road to the extent that we do because no one can be sure when a player will lose ability due to age/injury/etc. If we hadn't kicked the can down the road, he would be off the books already with the same amount of money paid to him.

I'll again say that I think the contract was just about perfect in hindsight in terms of length and dollars, because his last guarantees ran out last year.


I get that we have rolling dollars and a five year outlook, as do all teams, but we limit our ability to move on when it's time because the dead money forces our hand to an extent. Carr's contract is the perfect example--without a restructure, we could cut him today and only be on the hook for a $27.1m cap hit, instead it is a $50.1m cap hit due to restructuring. We go from being able to save $30m with an immediate cut to only saving $1.4m because of the dead money his restructure created.

That limits our ability to simply say, let's move on and give Rattler the reins, because we need to restructure multiple contracts to create space that otherwise wouldn't be needed.

That’s fair, but without the way we signed him, with a deal intended to be constantly restructured, we never get him.

Obviously in hindsight that would have (maybe) been a good thing, but from a pure “Hey, we need to sign the highest paid FA at a time we have no money” standpoint, it worked, but you have to account for that borrowed time and space at some point.

 

[meily]

These are the moves nobody predicts yet everyone loves to sky scream about the unsolvable cap issues we have.

Who did not know this was coming?

 

[Elvis]

So we paid for a player we all wanted to keep while not having current money by using future money, the same option is available today.

It’s annoying to look at on the books, but more emphasis needs to be placed on the 5 year cap outlook and what’s always there and available to pull from on a constant rolling and replenishment basis, and as a bonus, you’re allowed to be over the limit in future years.

Looking at it as single years will drive you insane.

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.

 

[SAINTSFAN]

These are the moves nobody predicts yet everyone loves to sky scream about the unsolvable cap issues we have.

Everyone expected this based on the renegotiation he did last year.

 

[SAINTSFAN]

What really exasperated the cap hell created by Loomis' strategy was covid and its effect on the salary cap. That created a huge mess he has chasing since then.

 

[SAINTSFAN]

I wonder what Taysom's situation is. If he decides to retire, he could do the same thing Ram did and open up more cap space (which could be the situation that could allow us to release Carr). We know players like McCoy, Granderson, Werner, Shaheed, Ruiz and probably Demario will get restructured to create space. The key will be trying to avoid pushing Carr's cap hits any further. I would expect some sort of renegotiation of Jordan and Mathieu to lower their salary. Wilson and Jamal Williams are obvious cuts that will save some cap. I would think Saunders and Shepherd are candidates for reduced salaries or cuts.

 

[St. Geezy]

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.

 

[saintfan1972]

This was one of the more obvious moves that needed to happen, thanks to Ram for making one more contribution to the team on his way out.

Ram was worth every penny, but he isn't losing money. Just "kicking that can" for us. The dead money is coming.

 

[St. Geezy]

What really exasperated the cap hell created by Loomis' strategy was covid and its effect on the salary cap. That created a huge mess he has chasing since then.

Yes, I think with it being four years ago it’s gone and forgotten, but absolutely 100%, that negative $30m swing on the cap progression years ago still has effects on today.

 

[sainthood]

The Saints need an eat your vegetables year to clean up the cap. The less pushing into the future the better. T

 

[St. Geezy]

The Saints need an eat your vegetables year to clean up the cap. The less pushing into the future the better. T

It already started last year, straight from Loomis’ mouth, but instead of acknowledging it, it has instead been weaponized.

We could have done WAY more last off-season to add players, but we have scaled things back to reload and get back to a better mean for easier future management.

 

[St. Widge]

What really exasperated the cap hell created by Loomis' strategy was covid and its effect on the salary cap. That created a huge mess he has chasing since then.

And it was compounded when he decided to give Carr the contract he gave him. A lot of the restructuring and bad contracts recently are a result of the COVID year and the Carr contract.

I was okay with the way they did the cap during the Brees years, but it's a bad strategy now. As Rouxble pointed out, it's gotten more extreme from 2021 to 2024, but I think that is related to what you identified, the COVID year, in addition to the Carr contract.

I do think Loomis is at least moving in the direction of getting things more normal but it's going to take time and I don't totally trust that he won't go YOLO at some point. But, whatever he does, he needs to stop adding all the void years to contracts which hurt our ability to reshape the roster. He also needs to find a way to get better at drafting and he needs to stop trading up. He's been fairly conservative on the trade ups since the Penning/Olave draft, but he even traded up for Kool-Aid. Although the rumor is that he had a deal to move down with LA last year had Bowers been on the board. It was a situation where he should not have done it, but at least we know he is at least somewhat open to the idea now.

I'd rather move on to a new GM, but I think we all know that isn't happening right now. But, if he does miss on this HC hire and fails to rebuild the team, I do think he will be gone within the next 3 years. Gayle is patient enough to give him one bad HC hire and the moves he made for that HC, but I can't see her being patient beyond that. Especially after the stepped in to fire DA mid-season.