Quote:
Originally Posted by GTripp0012
If you throw a ton of front loaded cap space at Peyton Manning, I think you are right that the $48 million figure can look a lot bigger than it really is. That $48 million can become $12 million really quickly and without guaranteed roster improvement. Look at how much the Redskins spent last year and what they got out of it.
But I do want to say this: Schneed is right when he says there are very limited ways to improve your team with available cap space. I believe the best use of the cap is to have as much available as possible for a day where you have so many critical veteran pieces to your team that you actually need to use that cap space to keep those guys together, but if you pay Peyton Manning mostly through 2012 and 2013 guaranteed roster bonuses, all that cap space spent to get Manning will still be there in 2014, and it limits the room to make bad signings just because you want to dispel the illusion that you are being cheap.
Marginal wins are almost impossible to buy in football with cash, whereas in baseball, you have pretty accurate estimates of a marginal win costing $4.8 million.
I buy your argument that Peyton is in decline, but I think if you strip out the Colts-offense related decline, Peyton's personal decline is much less steep, and you still have a pretty dominant player who is a better quarterback than Eli Manning and Michael Vick in the NFC East.
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Well, I certainly agree with you on re-signing your own being the smartest way to spend cap room. But I think there is plenty of good that can be done in the FA market. Just using last year's class of our own, the 2012 costs for the vet FAs we brought in (Cofield, Bowen, Atogwe, Wilson, Chester, Rocca) is right around 24 mil. Is that not a wise use of resources? Is there no way we can envision a repeat of that as a smart way to add to our depth? Or, we could probably sign a couple of guys like Ben Grubbs and Mario Manningham for about the same per year cost as Manning. Just dismissing the other uses of the cap space is not a fair way to look at the two sides of this.
And again, the rollovers mean even if we stayed below the cap, those become dollars we can spend in the future. So an argument centered around an implication that if we don't sign Manning or the dollars go to waste in some way is not really valid, imo.
The problem with arguing this is that it feels like debating arguments built around conflicting points:
A) that we should sign Manning because of the surety of how it will improve us. while at the same time dismissing the cap space argument because there's nothing you can do on the FA market that can really help the team.
B) that we shouldn't draft a QB because the odds are so against finding a star in the draft, while at the same time acting as if whatever else we would do with the draft picks is a sure bet to succeed.
Anyway, I probably won't be around the board much the next few days, so thanks for the convo guys.