re: Salary Cap Issues 2021

Some of you just baffle me. How are you “restructuring” players on their last year of their deal? The only way you can lower Ram and Lattimore cap hit is to sign them to extensions which i expect them to do. Loomis has given some “ghost years” to certain players but in not even sure you can do that for a player on a 5th year option and it would be incredibly dumb to do that with those two. On top of that this year you can’t and won’t use the franchise tag. They don’t have the money to do that. Hendrickson is gone. He will go to the highest bidder and it won’t and shouldn’t be us. I also expect Marcus Williams to walk. Trading armstead is def on the table. His value is as high as it ever will be. Restructuring Jordan, AK, Peat, Davis, MT (i expect them to explore trading him), and cutting janoris (possible extension), kwon (possible extension), Brown (I’d like to extend and lower his cap instead), most of that would get us close. But i do expect the nfl to give help to the teams this year cap wise. It isn’t a great situation but the Saints have overcome a lot of that and the way they draft they will be fine.

quote:

---

Armstead has a $16 mil cap hit next year (9% of the total cap space), heading into age 30 and final year of the deal

Jordan is taking up another 10% of the cap at nearly $19 mil

---

yeah i got into this in a lot more detail talking to that idiot Real Carolina yesterday

we're not NEARLY in as bad of shape as the projections say, but that doesn't mean we won't have some tough business decisions

Armstead and Cam are the 2 obvious guys who may be cut. it sucks, but it was eventually going to happen. they're both getting old and Cam seemed to lose a couple steps this year. that's why we invest so heavily in the OL and DL. next man up

some of my posts from that thread (so i don't have to type them again)

quote:

---

we may have to make some business decisions with good players (like Armstead, Jordan) but we don't need to "rebuild"

per OTC, we have 9 guys (including Brees) with a base salary $10M or more. that's a ton of room to work with

cutting Kwon alone saves $13M. we can easily restructure that entire deal to keep him and save almost all of that hit

---

quote:

---

Kwan and Ram alone are almost $24M that projection and can almost entirely be deferred with new deals

---

quote:

---

designating Brees a post June 1 cut saves $25M alone

if we did the same for Armstead that's another $11.75M

restructure Kwon to get his $13M hit to $1M (or we can cut him) and re-sign Ram to get his $11M his to $1

those 4 moves save about $60M

Latt is like Ram and over $10M that can be restructured lower with a new deal.

cutting Eason post June 1 saves $6.5M

cutting Malcom Brown post June 1 saves $5M

etc

---

quote:

---

The only way you can lower Ram and Lattimore cap hit is to sign them to extensions which i expect them to do. Loomis has given some “ghost years” to certain players but in not even sure you can do that for a player on a 5th year option and it would be incredibly dumb to do that with those two.

---

all we have to do is re-sign them and structure it so the cap hit is felt more next year. more signing than roster bonus will help

those 2 are like $22M of our cap hit. if we can cut that in half (which is TOTALLY reasonable) it will help a great deal

I know very little about contracts and their varying effects on the cap, so you’re clearly far more knowledgeable than me and I might be missing something, but... We have to do way more than just get down to next year’s projected cap number, no? We have like 21 free agents so we essentially have to get far enough below the cap number to basically add 21 guys to the roster through the draft or free agency? Seems pretty dire to me but again I may not be getting something right. Regardless though we are going to have to watch some very talented guys leave the squad this offseason and I don’t know how we can expect to replace them with anything near the same quality of player.