Matt Stafford?

Is Teddy Bridgewater better or worse than Goff?

 

Of course it was this season. Next season we're hopefully not rolling with as many rookies, and Fitterer has done something about the offensive line. I think we're even more likely to be a playoff team next year with a good QB than we were in 2020.

 

meant next season (2021). .. not next year (2022)
What is carolina’s cap currently looking like? How much can they spend currently in free agency?

 

Give me a few and I will write that up. We can have money if we want.

 

I'd put him one notch below Goff.


Goff takes too much shit. He never should have been drafted #1, or been handed that albatross of a contract, but people overvalue McVay's scheme. You have a quarterback who's won an NFC Championship (making legitimately great throws) and nearly took the Rams to another title game with a broken thumb. In terms of pure talent, Stafford is better, but it's close enough to make that trade a complete dumpster fire for Los Angeles.

 

Ok, here goes. This is going to be a little long.

First, the cap is going to FALL this year to $179 million. The bad news is that we have active contracts worth $163.5 million, and dead cap (Luke mainly) of $9 million. We get about $4 million rolled over from 2020, bringing our starting cap figure to $7.9 million. I got this from Spotrac, BTW.

An interesting thing that Spotrac does is fill out your roster with vet minimum contracts. So if you go to OverTheCap.com that will show more money. But figure seven draft picks are going to cost in the neighborhood of $8, and replace seven of those vet minimum contracts. So that takes about $3 more away at the end of the day. Our cap is now at roughly $5 million (I'm rounding a lot to make math easier to follow).

• We currently have two TEs, led by Ian Thomas (the other is a JAG at Vet Minimum). Figure we re-sigh Chris Manhertz unless we draft one. That would cost about 900K
• We have Greg Little at Tackle. That's it. We're going to need to bring Moton back and then some. I'm reasonably sure we will draft a Tackle, but Moton will likely get a deal for 14-15K a year. I expect Fitterer to make the first year worth about 8K and make up for that with Guarantees. We'll also go out and find some depth, which will likely cost us ~$3 million. So now, with TE and T set we are over the cap by $7 million.
• We have no Guards outside of Daley. We need Guards. Figure we will spend another $3 million on Guards, that will get us a decent starter. Could be a draft pick in play there also. Over the cap by $10 million now, but Offense is largely set.
• On defense we're actually ok outside of the MLB position. I think that we need to spend around $3 million there, it's a little more than Whitehead got but we need better. This could be optimistic.
• Efe Obada is going to get a 2nd round tender, so he will cost at least $3 million. If another team grabs him we will get a 3rd round pick for him, which may be what management wants.

Everywhere else we can likely replace anyone that's missing with depth/vet minimum salaries which are already factored in. We have built our roster and signed all our rookies and we are over the cap by about $16 million. So where do we get it?

• KK is on a shitty deal and will carry a cap figure of $21 million. This goes one of two ways--we cut him or basically re-sign him for Vet Minimum, like we did with Charles Johnson. Either way, we recoup about 10 million of that but probably have to spend a couple million to get a replacement 3-T. So that's $8 million back.
• Shaq Thompson is hitting us for $14 million this year. If we restructure his salary we can pay him veteran minimum and spread the rest out as bonus, which will reduce his current year's hit to $8 million, a $6 million savings.
• Stephen Weatherly is not worth 8.9 million per year. His dead cap is $2 million, time to move on. That gets us another $7 million.
• Matt Paradis is due $10 and he has a $5 million dead cap figure. This is a tough call because replacing him with anyone of quality is going to cost at least $5 million, so we likely roll with him again.
• CMC is another restructure possibility, and would save us $5.5 million in this year's cap if he did.
• Lastly, there's Teddy. We can't afford to cut him but we could restructure him and gain another $8 million in cap, which will likely be dead money in 2022. So don't want to do that.

So, based on that we're probably going to make enough moves to net us anywhere from $20-30 million, depending on how much Fitterer wants to be aggressive in 2021. That means we are going to have somewhere between $4-14 million to play around with in Free Agency. That's enough to re-sign Samuel if we want to go that route, but it's also enough to make a decent splash on just about any non-Quarterback in Free Agency.

Note that the cap is going down. New Orleans is completely fucked, they're over 100 million above the cap. Atlanta is $33 million over the cap. 15 teams are currently over the cap, and that's before any of them have signed their Free Agents. It's going to be a buyers market for JAGs, and there will be more than a few legit players out there who sign smaller contracts. I suspect most teams will offer guarantees in return for low initial salaries.

 

Damn. Respect all the work on that. Thanks