salary cap hell! (3 Viewers)

[Rouxble]

I will admit I don't understand all of the ins and outs of the salary cap so question for the cap gurus - how would we get under the cap this year without doing any restructures?

It’s impossible. We can’t do it without restructures.

 

[St. Geezy]

I will admit I don't understand all of the ins and outs of the salary cap so question for the cap gurus - how would we get under the cap this year without doing any restructures?

Not possible, which makes these daily/weekly posts all the more annoying every single time news comes out of a new restructure we did or some hotshot “journalist” writes an article or tweets about how screwed we are being $80 million over (on external paper).

 

[Rouxble]

An interesting thought exercise, where would these restructuring bonuses rank against signing bonuses for active contracts at each player's position? The top ten excluding the positionless Hill. Third column is approximate restructuring bonus, last column is how that bonus would rank against signing bonuses at the position.

Carr	QB	$28.8m	9th
Ramczyk	RT	$15.8m	4th
Jordan	Edge	$11.8m	31st
Kamara	RB	$10.5m	6th
Davis	ILB	$10.8m	4th
McCoy	C	$8.9m	3rd
Mathieu	SS	$7.8m	9th
Ruiz	OG	$8.2m	15th
Maye	FS	$6.0m	7th
Johnson	TE	$4.8m	22nd

The question becomes whether these players would be worth those signing bonuses if restructuring wasn't a requirement and we were signing them to a new deal today. Eight of the ten players are getting top ten bonuses, probably nine if you include Ruiz since they don't have separate rankings for left and right guards.

 

[Elvis]

Katherine Terrell does a nice job explaining some of the decisions that are going to be made with regards to the cap. I've provided a link to her tweet and her article.

Could cap decisions finally catch up to Saints?

As the Saints begin to age, continuously borrowing from the future to stay cap compliant could put them in a peculiar situation going forward.

www.espn.com

 

[Elvis]

Not possible, which makes these daily/weekly posts all the more annoying every single time news comes out of a new restructure we did or some hotshot “journalist” writes an article or tweets about how screwed we are being $80 million over (on external paper).

Feel free to stop reading and replying to these posts that annoy you so greatly. Nobody is forcing you to participate, but some of us are interested in this topic.

 

[St. Geezy]

Feel free to stop reading and replying to these posts that annoy you so greatly. Nobody is forcing you to participate, but some of us are interested in this topic.

Oh I’m clearly very interested also, still doesn’t make it less annoying seeing people act like the Saints aren’t facing the same issues as other teams just with a different cosmetics.

You guys also have the benefit of hindsight. Just about everyone on this board was pumped about our roster going into 2023. The roster (and more so the coaches IMO) failed, so now you blame the salary cap for that.

 

[Elvis]

Oh I’m clearly very interested also, still doesn’t make it less annoying seeing people act like the Saints aren’t facing the same issues as other teams just with a different cosmetics.

You guys also have the benefit of hindsight. Just about everyone on this board was pumped about our roster going into 2023. The roster (and more so the coaches IMO) failed, so now you blame the salary cap for that.

You just aren't listening to what people are saying and keep trying to move the bar to the coaches and the players. I am saying that we have less recourse to fix roster problems because of the way we manage the cap. Pushing the money into multiple future years we can't predict instead of paying salaries year to year isn't a good strategy when done to the degree we're doing it. We have done it to the maximum and it has hurt the teams ability to improve the roster by subtraction.

Look at Ramczyk for example. He has a big contract and the cap hit for him was low during the first 3 years of the contract and the highest salaries and bonus numbers are coming due now. If we'd paid more of that upfront, we would be able to move off of his contract because we would already have paid him some of the guaranteed portions while he was still healthy. But he's not healthy, his knee is worn out and isn't getting better. He is currently going to account more than 10% of our cap number while he is in decline or even possibly unable to play. If we restructure him it will guarantee parts of his salary that are not guaranteed now. Which will only push his cap number higher in years he is even less likely to be playing. Who in their right mind is converting non-guaranteed salary to fully guaranteed bonuses for a player who could possibly never play again? Only the Saints are doing that and this is only one example of many. When the many contracts like this are taken all together, it's a huge mess with few good choices to make.

I know someone is going to say something like "you can never predict injuries, that's just bad luck" which is true. But you also don't have to leave so little flexibility that you can't deal with a problem like Ram, or Michael Thomas, or a potential problem with Lattimore, or AK's inevitable drop off. The NFL is too unpredictable to be planning for the cap 5 years out.

 

[St. Geezy]

You just aren't listening to what people are saying and keep trying to move the bar to the coaches and the players. I am saying that we have less recourse to fix roster problems because of the way we manage the cap. Pushing the money into multiple future years we can't predict instead of paying salaries year to year isn't a good strategy when done to the degree we're doing it. We have done it to the maximum and it has hurt the teams ability to improve the roster by subtraction.

Look at Ramczyk for example. He has a big contract and the cap hit for him was low during the first 3 years of the contract and the highest salaries and bonus numbers are coming due now. If we'd paid more of that upfront, we would be able to move off of his contract because we would already have paid him some of the guaranteed portions while he was still healthy. But he's not healthy, his knee is worn out and isn't getting better. He is currently going to account more than 10% of our cap number while he is in decline or even possibly unable to play. If we restructure him it will guarantee parts of his salary that are not guaranteed now. Which will only push his cap number higher in years he is even less likely to be playing. Who in their right mind is converting non-guaranteed salary to fully guaranteed bonuses for a player who could possibly never play again? Only the Saints are doing that and this is only one example of many. When the many contracts like this are taken all together, it's a huge mess with few good choices to make.

I know someone is going to say something like "you can never predict injuries, that's just bad luck" which is true. But you also don't have to leave so little flexibility that you can't deal with a problem like Ram, or Michael Thomas, or a potential problem with Lattimore, or AK's inevitable drop off. The NFL is too unpredictable to be planning for the cap 5 years out.

I am indeed listening, I just don’t agree. I firmly feel if we hadn’t whiffed on so many picks and acquisitions and had better coaching, we’d be a better football team.

You can scream to the top of your lungs, but my position will always remain that it’s player personnel and coaching personnel errors that have us where we are, not cap management techniques.

Cap management has become the easy target in hindsight only after the player acquisitions (and seemingly, the coaches) didn’t work out.

In your opinion we are in cap hell, but we are only in so-called cap hell because we maximized the cap. The problem is we maximized it with the wrong people.

 

[Belfast Saint]

The problem is we maximized it with the wrong people.

Yes, but the real problem is that mistakes will always be made in personnel decisions, and if you're maxed out all the time, your flexibility to correct mistakes in personnel decisions is more constrained. It just introduces a greater level of risk to personnel decisions which is presumably why Loomis is keen to navigate a way back to slightly more balanced position - to reduce the risk associated personnel decisions and increase the level of flexibility when things go wrong.

 

[Elvis]

I am indeed listening, I just don’t agree. I firmly feel if we hadn’t whiffed on so many picks and acquisitions and had better coaching, we’d be a better football team.

You can scream to the top of your lungs, but my position will always remain that it’s player personnel and coaching personnel errors that have us where we are, not cap management techniques.

Cap management has become the easy target in hindsight only after the player acquisitions (and seemingly, the coaches) didn’t work out.

In your opinion we are in cap hell, but we are only in so-called cap hell because we maximized the cap. The problem is we maximized it with the wrong people.

The people responsible for the cap, the draft and hiring of coaches are all the same people. The draft is and will always be a gamble. If your cap strategy relies on hitting all of your draft picks, it's a bad strategy. If you rely on coaches getting the most out of old players on expensive contracts because you missed on draft picks and can't afford to replace the old players because of the cap, it's a bad cap strategy. What you call maximizing the cap only works if both of the other things work but I have yet to see a single team that has made it succeed. This team certainly isn't making it succeed.

 

[saint_drago]

You just aren't listening to what people are saying and keep trying to move the bar to the coaches and the players. I am saying that we have less recourse to fix roster problems because of the way we manage the cap. Pushing the money into multiple future years we can't predict instead of paying salaries year to year isn't a good strategy when done to the degree we're doing it. We have done it to the maximum and it has hurt the teams ability to improve the roster by subtraction.

Look at Ramczyk for example. He has a big contract and the cap hit for him was low during the first 3 years of the contract and the highest salaries and bonus numbers are coming due now. If we'd paid more of that upfront, we would be able to move off of his contract because we would already have paid him some of the guaranteed portions while he was still healthy. But he's not healthy, his knee is worn out and isn't getting better. He is currently going to account more than 10% of our cap number while he is in decline or even possibly unable to play. If we restructure him it will guarantee parts of his salary that are not guaranteed now. Which will only push his cap number higher in years he is even less likely to be playing. Who in their right mind is converting non-guaranteed salary to fully guaranteed bonuses for a player who could possibly never play again? Only the Saints are doing that and this is only one example of many. When the many contracts like this are taken all together, it's a huge mess with few good choices to make.

I know someone is going to say something like "you can never predict injuries, that's just bad luck" which is true. But you also don't have to leave so little flexibility that you can't deal with a problem like Ram, or Michael Thomas, or a potential problem with Lattimore, or AK's inevitable drop off. The NFL is too unpredictable to be planning for the cap 5 years out.

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding between Cap Defenders and Cap Truthers. The Cap Defenders keep explaining the process and how it works. They pat the chicken littles on the head and tell them there is nothing to worry about. Cap Truthers understand the how, they just don't understand the why. Why operate like this? Why leave yourself so little wiggle room and no margin for error? Why operate with so little flexibility? Why is the house on fire but nobody else seems to notice?

And the biggest why for me is this, in this copycat league where people will steal anything that works, why don't other teams start each offseason in the hole 60-100 million over the cap? You mean to tell me that we have the one guy on earth who has solved the mystery of the salary cap? We see teams go all in when they have the QB to make a run and assemble dream teams but they don't end up where the Saints have been for years. Why? Why don't they go all in and then stay all in even when it no longer makes sense?

As a former cap defender I know all the arguments. The arguments were sound when we had Brees and SP. The strategy was sound. But there's just no way to justify it now. And it's not hindsight. For years I've been talking about life after Brees and what that would look like. I didn't think there was any way they would adopt all in as standard operating procedure. But here we are...

But the point is moot. At this point they have to do what they have to do. They no longer have a choice. They backed themselves into a corner and this is life now for Saints fans. Our Super Bowl is the offseason as we watch the Saints heroically get under the cap and then sign a few bargain bin free agents.

 

[SigFreudianSlip]

Matt chimes in.

 

[Judge_Smails]

I am indeed listening, I just don’t agree. I firmly feel if we hadn’t whiffed on so many picks and acquisitions and had better coaching, we’d be a better football team.

You can scream to the top of your lungs, but my position will always remain that it’s player personnel and coaching personnel errors that have us where we are, not cap management techniques.

Cap management has become the easy target in hindsight only after the player acquisitions (and seemingly, the coaches) didn’t work out.

In your opinion we are in cap hell, but we are only in so-called cap hell because we maximized the cap. The problem is we maximized it with the wrong people.

Not trying to be rude, but it seems like you’re saying you don’t like reading posts sharing viewpoints you don’t agree with, yet you consistently reply to these posts to chastise those discussing said topics.

It seems you’ve made quite a conundrum for yourself because a lot of Saints fans are going to continue criticizing “kicking the can” for as long as the Saints remain mediocre or worse with an old roster and without a true franchise QB.

Right now it looks like we are barely treading water a little less efficiently each year.

 

[lilvipa221]

I am indeed listening, I just don’t agree. I firmly feel if we hadn’t whiffed on so many picks and acquisitions and had better coaching, we’d be a better football team.

You can scream to the top of your lungs, but my position will always remain that it’s player personnel and coaching personnel errors that have us where we are, not cap management techniques.

Cap management has become the easy target in hindsight only after the player acquisitions (and seemingly, the coaches) didn’t work out.

In your opinion we are in cap hell, but we are only in so-called cap hell because we maximized the cap. The problem is we maximized it with the wrong people.

I would argue that the cap management techniques the Saints are using are a problem and if you utilize this technique then it better result in a super bowl or you should be fired. Rams and Bucs are good examples of using it correctly then right sizing the cap immediately and getting out to start the rebuild process again.

Teams like the Dolphins, Chargers and Bills are teams that are going to set themselves back with nothing to show for it.

 

[Elvis]

I would argue that the cap management techniques the Saints are using are a problem and if you utilize this technique then it better result in a super bowl or you should be fired. Rams and Bucs are good examples of using it correctly then right sizing the cap immediately and getting out to start the rebuild process again.

Teams like the Dolphins, Chargers and Bills are teams that are going to set themselves back with nothing to show for it.

The Chargers have a ton of flexibility so they'll be fine. They may part with some good players via trade, but they can get assets back for a lot of those guys clearing a lot of cap. That is something Harbaugh might want to do regardless.

The Bills do have some challenges, but the biggest contract they have is also their best player and there is room to absorb some of his salary into bonuses in 2027/2028 when he is only 31 or 32 years old. That knocks their deficit in half without the use of void years. They can drop another $6.7 million by cutting Von Miller and from there they can get the rest of the way pretty easily with cuts/trades or restructures. That is without touching their $30.8 million in cap space in 2025.

The Dolphins are a bit tougher. They did kind of go all in and came up short. If they like Tua and want to extend him, then they can take care of a bit right there. The rest I would assume they would push into 2025 where they are $58 million under the cap.

As it stands today, the Saints are the only team that is already over the cap for 2025 with nearly $40 million to clear. But I keep hearing we're not the only ones that do it this way.