Why is the Saints cap situation so bad?

Loomis

Do you remember a few seasons ago when we were like $80-100M over the cap? We "kicked the can" and spread out those overages over future years.

Just a basic primer on NFL signing bonuses. The player gets the money up front but the cap impact is spread over the life of the deal. If you cut a player prior to the end of that deal, the cap impact that hadn't affect your cap accelerates.

So, just an easy example. 4 year contract with $20M signing bonus. The cap impacts are:

Year1: $5M
Year2: $5M
Year3: $5M
Year4: $5M

If you cut the player prior to year 3, then year 3 will have that $10M pro-rated portion that hadn't yet hit the cap, accelerated onto the cap of year 3. This $10M is called "dead money".

So to apply this to the saints, when we were $80-100M over the cap, we had a ton of large base salaries. These are counted 100% against the cap in the year when they are received. What "Loomising" is, was converting that base salary into a signing bonus, spreading the impact of that money over more years. This is the "kicking" (spreading of impact) of the "can" (monetary impact on our cap).

The problem is if you do this over and over, you end up with HUGE balls of dead money, where it becomes prohibitive to get rid of a player. You can't cut them and save money, and you need to save money to get under the huge holes dug in ($80-100M over the cap scenarios).

So Loomis compounded the situation by using void years. So that 4/20 scenario above becomes 5/20. The 5th year is a void year, so it counts to spread out the cap impact, but there is no salary. So now it's $4M/year and that 5th year requires either extending the player or eating a large dead cap (which is difficult to do if we're *$80-100M over the cap). We extended Cam Jordan to an insane deal this offseason because we didn't want to eat his void year (although admittedly we did let Peat walk and ate his, so they're trying to nibble when they can).

The contracts of Lattimore and Ramczyk have been our "cookie jar" and the injury to Ramczyk and the issues with Latt have caused us to accelerate the plan. Signing Carr to that deal is utterly insane given the scenario involved.

Arrogance.

Chasing a championship run where the window clearly shut several years prior.

Loomis is an addict for that drug.

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Why is the Saints cap situation so bad?

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So as a Saints fan, we have to bite the bullet for likely 4 more seasons before a serious championship run can commence.

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Arrogance.

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Yep.

It's called being Arrogant and unaware of your own incapabilities. It's called thinking that you are smart and competent, but, really, you are not smart and rather incompetent. It's called having a "bean counter" run the player personnel analysis and acquisitions and being too arrogant to realize that you need a TRUE "football personnel" guy as your GM.

This is the stuff that crashes Empires, my friends, and, rest assured, it will crash the New Orleans NFL franchise, which indeed was never close to any kind of "empire" or "dynasty", unless one can achieve a Dynasty of Failure.

Drew Bree$

Tom played for Super Bowls.
Drew played for money.

Drew played for many years below what he could have been payed.

A real source of our cap issues are due to trading draft picks to draft or sign one player. And those players didn’t reach potential.

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