Dibs

Yeah, I've always thought the same thing about having to drive on the right side of the road. People should be convinced to do so, not forced to.

This joke works much better using Aussie slang and a Wombat.....the punchline being "He eats roots and leaves." http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=root

Eli is in the last year of his contract.....will be an UFA in 2016.

Did someone say aardvark?

With the cap rollover rules it doesn't really make much difference. Take the hit now means the money won't roll to next years cap. I don't think that the level of salary or dead hit for these players will have much effect on the decision making process of whether to cut or keep them. Either they(Urbik and C.Williams) will be viewed as beneficial to the roster and be kept....or they will be viewed as not up to scratch and will be cut.

No. Chris Williams had a $3.5M signing bonus. If we cut him we save $0.725M and are up for a $2.625M dead cap hit. Urbik is similar but a year later in his contract. If we cut Urbik we save $2.35M and are up for a $1.4M dead cap hit.

Try 23 mil over: http://www.spotrac.com/nfl/new-orleans-saints/cap/

Additionally, chosing a play that has a lower chance of a turnover in that position should be factored in as well.

That wasn't my experience. In a bar with a crowd of Australians who generally don't know the finer intricacies of the game, and the vast majority were stunned at the play call.....even the Pats fans. This was before Collinsworth made his comments on the play. Also, there is a world of difference between the decision to pass on 2nd and goal from the 5(49ers) than 2nd and goal from less than 1(Seahawks).

....or then and than.

It seems that nowadays Elway is greatly underrated. Unquestionably he should be top 10......and I think legitimate consideration for best ever. Which Manning? Eli is only 3rd best in his imediate family. Aikman? Who apart from maybe Cowboys fans would consider him best of all time? Probably wasn't even top 5 in his own era.

The contemporary candidates in any pole will typically be viewed as better. It is difficult for people who have never really seen Montana to be able to compare him to Brady......just as it would be difficult for those who have never seen Otto Graham to compare him to Montana(or Brady). In regards to Brady, though I believe he fully deserves to be in the conversation, his on field demeanor of whinging/poor loser, combined with the cheating issues very much detracts from him being the "greatest". One can bandy factors such as coaching, team strength, SB records, playoff records etc as much as they like......but to me, somebody who acts like a spoiled brat on the field can never be considered the greatest of all time.

He was due $6.8M in 2015 had we kept him.

It hurts the future roster. Effectively if you restructure Mario so that it frees up more cap dollars now, those saved cap dollars in today's cap will reduce the cap space in later years. One has to assume that the extra cap dollars gained from the restructure would be used in this cap. This means that that money would not be rolled over into future caps......and also means that the players whom the monies were spent on are most likely additional cap hits into future years(given a contract longer than 1 year). It also means that Mario's cap hits are moved into future years. This would then mean that in future years when we want to re-sign all of the excellent talent that we have drafted in recent years, there will be fewer cap dollars to be able to retain them. This is the method teams use when they are making a run at the Superbowl. You spend tomorrow's money today when you believe you have a legitimate shot. The longer you push the envelope in deferring cap dollars, the worse cap situation you will be in down the road. The Saints are the latest example of this. As the Bills have so much young talent on the roster whom they would likely wish to re-sign down the road, it makes no sense to spend tomorrow's cap dollars today and weaken our future team unless we believe that we have a legitimate shot at winning the SB.

I don't understand all of the talk about Mario restructuring. Has there been any legitimate rumour to this.....or is it just a bunch of fans speculating? Unless people mean that Mario will agree to a pay cut(which I can't see happening), restructuring Mario would mean freeing up extra cap dollars today....but tightening our cap for tomorrow(when we will want to be re-signing Dareus, Glenn, Kiko, Bradham, Gilmore, Watkins, Brown etc). Restructuring Mario would make sense if we had a legitimate shot at the SB(meaning that we had a top QB).....but doing it at this point in time would be unnecessarily hurting our roster of the future.

No probs....and I tend to agree with you. Though we don't know to what extent Rex has a man crush on Revis(which could influence things), he certainly seemed quite infatuated with the current talent on the defence. I personally think that a key factor will be how highly Whaley(and Rex) rates Gilmore. If they don't envision keeping him past his rookie contract they may chose to invest early in the CB position(Revis).....but on the flip side, if they see him as a lynchpin for the future, then Revis perhaps would not be seen as very good value for the money. I too have faith that Whaley is prudent in how he spends the cap dollars available.

The Pats cap number was listed under the assumption that they don't take up the 2015 option year.

For interest sake, assuming that the Patriots don't exercise Revis' option.....and assuming it is a 3 horse race.....the current cap space for the 3 teams(according to spotrac) are: Patriots: $17M Bills: $31M Jets: $49M

The center is allowed to do head bobs without drawing a penalty. It happens fairly regularly.

I feel as deflated as a Patriots game ball.

I gave my conclusions upthread.....but will give reasonings here for them. Regardless of how big a slice of the overall pie that the players negotiate for, the money is portioned out via cap spend. Each team has a certain amount that they can pay their players. Fully guaranteeing contracts would mean that any bad contracts(ones that are needed to be terminated prior to the full term, either due to injury or bad performance) would cost the team's salary cap in higher dead cap hits.....thus leaving less money to spend on players. Player salaries would have to be reduced to cover the extra monies given in dead contracts. It would also follow that in order to avoid any massive dead contracts that the length of contracts would also be greatly reduced. For instance, a player who would now get 6 years at 12M/year would become an extremely dangerous one if fully guaranteed. If injured after 1 year, it would mean a 12M dead hit for the following 5 years. Even worse would be when players fail to perform to the level of pay they are receiving. Players like Fitz(with Bills) or Cutler would become a burden to their team......earning high dollars without the ability to get remove their contracts from the books. The money enforced to spend on them would directly result how much can be spent on other players. Star players would also likely take a larger chunk than they do now. In order to win the bidding war to obtain them, teams would essentially have to gamble that the player will play at a high level throughout their contracts. As we all know, this is often not the case, and again that extra money spent on the underperforming star player cannot then be spent on other players. I think that fully guaranteed contracts would mean shorter contracts for lesser monies.....it would mean older players would get much smaller contracts than they do now for fear of performance drop off......and it would mean that a few mistakes in signings could set a team back for years. It seems to be very much a "be careful what you wish for" scenario for players wanting fully guaranteed contracts.

I think perhaps that you could do a decent job writing for the media.

It seems that a vast majority of journalist are incapable of using logic in their thought processes.....but they can string together words to sound good. Darnell seems like he could fit right in.

Fully guaranteed contracts would mean lower dollars/year contracts and for shorter terms. It would also likely mean an even higher pay disparity between the star players and the average players. Not knowing the NFLs pension/injury schemes, I assume Dockett has some decent points in that area......but asking for fully guaranteed contracts is perhaps highlighting why his eggs were only in the "can play football" basket.

Having been inspired by fellow posters(mainly NoSaint and Dave Mcbride), I thought I would have a closer look at QB Fumble Per Sack rates from a larger sample of QBs. The reasons for doing this are to see if Brady's FPS improvements were an aberration, or if indeed there were other QBs who had similar improvements after the 2006 season......and also after their first 6 seasons(the number of years played by Brady prior to 2007). This is a very simplistic study as QB fumbles will not always directly correlate to QB sacks. QB scrambles and miscommunication between QB and Center can add non-sack related fumbles......but it should give a decent basic view. Below are the Fumble Per Sack rates. (Numbers indicate how many sacks each QB takes per fumble. Numbers used are for total fumbles. I also limited results to QBs who had at least 3 good seasons prior to 2007 or 3 good seasons after 2006.) Brady Overall: 3.8, Pre-2007: 3.1, Post-2006: 5.1 P. Manning Overall: 3.9, Pre-2007: 3.8, Post-2006: 4.0 Brees Overall: 3.5, Pre-2007: 3.4, Post-2006: 3.6 E. Manning Overall: 3.3, Pre-2007: 3.1, Post-2006: 3.3 Roethisberger Overall: 5.4, Pre-2007: 11.0, Post-2006: 4.6 McNabb Overall: 4.3, Pre-2007: 4.5, Post-2006: 4.1 Favre Overall: 3.2, Pre-2007: 3.1, Post-2006: 3.6 Warner Overall: 2.5, Pre-2007: 2.8, Post-2006: 2.1 As one can see, Brady is the only one with a significant improvement post-2006....and the only one with any major variance at all apart from Big Ben who seemed to be fumble proof in his first 3 seasons(2004-2006). As 2006 was Brady's 6th season, I thought I would have a further look at some QBs first 6 good seasons compared to the rest of their careers. This will address the point that Dave brought up earlier that QBs could very well improve their fumble rate as they gained more experience. Brady Overall: 3.8, First 6 seasons: 3.1, Post 6th season: 5.1 P.Manning Overall: 3.9, First 6 seasons: 3.8, Post 6th season: 3.9 Brees Overall: 3.5, First 6 seasons: 3.1, Post 6th season: 4.0 E. Manning Overall: 3.3, First 6 seasons: 2.9, Post 6th season: 3.8 Roethisberger Overall: 5.4, First 6 seasons: 6.2, Post 6th season: 4.5 McNabb Overall: 4.3, First 6 seasons: 4.7, Post 6th season: 4.0 Favre Overall: 3.2, First 6 seasons: 3.3, Post 6th season: 3.1 Rivers Overall: 3.7, First 6 seasons: 3.3, Post 6th season: 4.4 Cutler Overall: 3.4, First 6 seasons: 3.2, Post 6th season: 3.8 The numbers seem to somewhat support Dave Mcbride's view. Though Brady still has a statistically anomalous improvement of 2.0, many of the QBs improved their FPS rate after their first 6 seasons. Rivers had the second highest with a 1.1 improvement, and Brees and E.Manning had a 0.9 improvement. Roethisberger again was an aberration in the reverse having a 1.7 regression. Out of the 9 QBs looked at here, 5 had FPS rate improvement of above 0.5, with only 2 having a regression of greater than 0.5. I honestly think that this is all rather inconclusive as it is possible that Brady's improvement after 2006 might well have simply been a statistical anomaly akin to that of Roethisberger's. The difference between the two however is that one really has no logical reasons as to why Big Ben didn't fumble much early in his career.......but with Brady we have the deflategate, gameball rule change and team fumble stats to supply an unsavory reason as to why his fumble rate improved so much at that point in his career. For interest sake, here are all the QBs I looked at, and their career fumble rates in order from best to worst. (I was very surprised by some of the results on this list.) Rogers: 5.2 Orton: 5.0 A.Smith: 4.0 Roethisberger: 4.5 McNabb: 4.3 Palmer: 4.2 Flacco: 4.0 Romo: 4.0 P.Manning: 3.9 Brady: 3.8 Rivers: 3.7 Brees: 3.5 Cutler: 3.4 E.Manning: 3.3 Favre: 3.2 Warner: 2.5