The cap situation McBeane inhereted

[ExiledInIllinois]

See what the Bears did with Mack and The Cap... How come we never try stuff like that?

 

Are Big Markets @ that much of an advantage?  Or are all markets the same.  We always seem to be having issues.

 

 

2 minutes ago, kota said:

and the Bills will have 90M in CAP space next year to resign, and sign players to the team.  Welcome to the NFL.  

But nobody wants to come to Podunk USA.

 

Sorry to say that.  We will end up blowing Our wad on some quitter, traitor, mental case, etc...

 

We really are the League's whipping post.

 

Just eliminate the cap and let the Big Markets shoot themselves in the foot.  Right now, I have been saying for 20+ years The League is creating inequity, unbalanced competition, and protecting the Big Markets from themselves.

 

 

[Ol Dirty B]

4 hours ago, NoSaint said:

Everyone spends to the cap. It’s not just for making a push. There’s a requirement of spending a rolling average of 90-ish percent. We chose to cut bait with 90% of the young core including young guys on rookie deals and second contract guys with big dead money. Now we are old and broke. It was a choice. You might agree or disagree with the strategy but it was not forced on anyone but the fans.

 

No you're just uneducated. You just don't get it. 

 

Everyone complained about Ralph being cheap, us not retaining guys. Then we retain guys, spend to the cap, and now it's wreckless spending. But those are the educated fans. It's a !@#$ing joke. I expected this team to be bad, I expected this last year. I think it's more of a surprise to the guys making threads like this rather than people who are asking what are you replacing the talent you are running out of town with?

 

We knew it'd be bad. We been bitching about it since the beginning. I don't trust these guys, you do. They sound like high school coaches to me. Even the OP said something about it starts with talent, well your coach on one of those training camp specials says he doesn't care about talent, he wants hard workers.

 

This roster reflects that extremely naive and misguided approach.

 

 

[Jauronimo]

18 minutes ago, Batman1876 said:

They absolutely could have kept restructuring guys, like they did Wood, that’s one option that could have been taken. This crew thought that such an approach would have a lower ceiling. They felt the talent on the team was not good enough to justify that approach so they took the start over approach. They did a good job of getting value for their guys who they chose to move on from and they did a good job of freeing future cap space. Time will tell if they do a good job with using those resources to build a team. Their drafts look good so far but who knows if the players develop. We also don’t know if they will succeed in free agency when they go in with cap space to do what they want with. We also don’t know how things would have gone if they had gone the other route, 2018 would likely have been better but 2019 and beyond will always be a mystery. 

 

Playing one one mystery against another is a fools errand. It’s also foolish to attack a plan when it’s in the preliminary stages. 

I completely agree.  They chose this situation.  There were options.  Inherit is very misleading.

[thunderingsquid]

8 hours ago, I am the egg man said:

 

.....if this season continues as it presently is, no quality FA will want to come here and those who do will have to be overpaid.   

 

A catch-22 dog chasing it's tail conundrum that has been going on here for quite some time.

That's why smart teams build through the draft.

[reddogblitz]

8 hours ago, SoCal Deek said:

Nobody would debate that the current regime wasn’t dealt a good hand.  But...when you’re in a hole STOP DIGGING!!  It doesn’t look to me that they’ve done much better with regard to the veteran contracts that they’ve brought in. They’d have better off going with a 53man all rookie roster.

 

I would.  The current regime inherited a team that had gone exactly .500 over the past 3 years.  We had all our first round picks in hand. They had some good offensive personnel and defensive for that matter just badly coached.  In fact, the team was good enough to get to the playoffs their first season.  Sounds like a pretty decent hand to me as far as these things go.

 

When I think of a bad hand, I think of Hue and Cleveland.  Now that's a bad hand.

[Bing Bong]

53 minutes ago, Batman1876 said:

I’ve not noticed us geiving up runs up the middle. The Ravens got no run game going and the Chargers ran the edges, not the middle. 

Nobody cares. He's on a front 7 that sucks. You're defense is that they're killing us on the outside? Awesome. Glad we got a guy that doesn't have any effect on how a team wants to put up 100+ rushing yards on us. We got a keeper GM huh.

[ExiledInIllinois]

It reall is:

 

 

And it's starting to suck more than ever!

[Batman1876]

7 minutes ago, PetermanThrew5Picks said:

Nobody cares. He's on a front 7 that sucks. You're defense is that they're killing us on the outside? Awesome. Glad we got a guy that doesn't have any effect on how a team wants to put up 100+ rushing yards on us. We got a keeper GM huh.

A bit misleading, no? Was there a guy that could cover the whole field?

15 minutes ago, Jauronimo said:

I completely agree.  They chose this situation.  There were options.  Inherit is very misleading.

I’m curious what solution you would have prefers to the problem?

[longtimebillsfan]

9 hours ago, Batman1876 said:

Background- Whaley spent to the cap in the 2013 season, 2014 season, 2015 season and 2016 season.  He never rolled over more than 2 mil in any single year. In order to sustain this spending contracts had to be back loaded and contracts needed to be reworked.  These things are common in teams making a championship push, we never made that push but we did pay for the attempt.

 

2017- Heading into the off season we had 24 million in cap space. Our major free agents were Woods, Goodwin, Gilmore, Zack Brown and Lorenzo Alexander. In order to have resigned them they would have needed to rely on cheep contracts now that become expensive later, as well as renegotiating other contracts. Looking ahead these choices would eventually lead to not being able to retain talent, just like retaining Woods, Gilmore and Goodwin was going to be tough in 2017. 

 

Looking ahead to 2018- Talent was going to be lost on the way to 2018, no way around it.  There wouldn't be cap room to replace that talent either meaning the reliance was going to be solely on the draft to fill those gaps. If you look at how our cap would have projected you can see the crunch we were in.  These figures are based on the actual 2018 cap hits of these players or the cost to have kept their contracts in the case of traded players. Some of these players may have had larger cap hits for us as a consequence of squeezing them under our 2017 cap.

 

The players we did not resign

Gilmore- 12.5

Woods-5.5

Goodwin-6.2

Total 24.2

 

The players we traded

Watkins- 13.2 (cost of 5th year option)

Darius- 16

Glenn-15

Tyrod-16

Total-60.2

 

The retirement

Wood- 9

 

Players we kept

Mccoy-9

Clay-9

Hughes-10.4

K Williams- 5.5

Total 33.9

 

The total for that core group of players that our 2016 roster was built around would have been 127.3 million in 2018

 

Leaving 50 Million to sign 2017 rookies, 2018 rookies and fill a total of 41 other roster spots an impossible task.

 

 

This is something that most bills fans have a vague awareness of, but thank you for laying it out for us.  It makes Beane look much more pragmatic.   This must have taken you a great deal of research.

[Jauronimo]

3 minutes ago, Batman1876 said:

A bit misleading, no? Was there a guy that could cover the whole field?

I’m curious what solution you would have prefers to the problem?

Define the problem.

[Batman1876]

14 minutes ago, Jauronimo said:

Define the problem.

Take an expensive mediocre team and build a contender from it as soon as possible. 

[ctk232]

9 hours ago, Rigotz said:

We all knew this season would be bad. It's only surprising to the Git Er Done crew.

Yep. And thank you OP.

 

Beane fully understood the situation he was inheriting, though there isn't much he could have done. He chose to rebuild a team rather then assemble something using what pieces he had at the time. And as OP's brief background noted, Whaley made a push to end a drought that left massive contract dumps for Beane to inherit and attempt some semblance of an NFL roster. No one, in the organization, fans included, thought the drought would end in their first year. And it wasn't until KB signing that we made an honest attempt as an organization beyond the player level. It was also a year with the greatest disparity between teams in the league, leaving the door to the playoffs much more wide open than many other seasons in the NFL. What we saw last year wasn't to plan, but certainly granted some great relief in getting the monkey off the back. 

 

Right now we've invested in a future 1-2 years down the line from seeing really coming together. We signed our future QBs in Allen and Edmunds - the latter of which is equally being left to the dogs in a way, yet handling his situation at his age very well. There are glaring holes at crucial foundation points that we all knew coming into the season would be difficult to bandaid. But if nothing else, we will be in better cap situation coming next year and the year after, potential for a high draft pick, and hopefully we capitalize on some high points now and salvage what season we can. 

Edited September 18, 2018 by ctk232

[Avisan]

4 hours ago, NoSaint said:

I remember 2 years ago being 7-8 and this board being Overwhelmingly in unison that the team was underachieving because of bad coaching and could probably use an upgrade at qb.

 

suddenly the narrative is the whole roster was overpaid and terrible and McDermott had one of the tallest tasks imaginable 

Yep.  And it was proven in 2017 when a gutted Whaley roster was still able to squeak in despite not getting comparable replacement players.

 

The premise of the OP is total nonsense, too.  Of course keeping EVERYONE is often too expensive.  Few people are asking to have kept everyone.

 

Re-run the numbers sans Gilmore and Goodwin, and all of a sudden we have PLENTY of cap space.  If those are the only two we lose, we're in great shape with the cap, have way fewer holes, and have no issues signing everyone we need to sign.  Hell, I'll throw Glenn in there, since he had so much trouble staying on the field.  All of a sudden we have 70+ cap space to sign 42 players (only 51 count), and since depth/ST players are generally JAGs and late-round picks making close to the vet minimum, we're in fantastic shape.

 

Keeping everyone was a tall task.  That doesn't make getting rid of everyone necessary.

[Laughing Coffin]

10 hours ago, Batman1876 said:

Background- Whaley spent to the cap in the 2013 season, 2014 season, 2015 season and 2016 season.  He never rolled over more than 2 mil in any single year. In order to sustain this spending contracts had to be back loaded and contracts needed to be reworked.  These things are common in teams making a championship push, we never made that push but we did pay for the attempt.

 

2017- Heading into the off season we had 24 million in cap space. Our major free agents were Woods, Goodwin, Gilmore, Zack Brown and Lorenzo Alexander. In order to have resigned them they would have needed to rely on cheep contracts now that become expensive later, as well as renegotiating other contracts. Looking ahead these choices would eventually lead to not being able to retain talent, just like retaining Woods, Gilmore and Goodwin was going to be tough in 2017. 

 

Looking ahead to 2018- Talent was going to be lost on the way to 2018, no way around it.  There wouldn't be cap room to replace that talent either meaning the reliance was going to be solely on the draft to fill those gaps. If you look at how our cap would have projected you can see the crunch we were in.  These figures are based on the actual 2018 cap hits of these players or the cost to have kept their contracts in the case of traded players. Some of these players may have had larger cap hits for us as a consequence of squeezing them under our 2017 cap.

 

The players we did not resign

Gilmore- 12.5

Woods-5.5

Goodwin-6.2

Total 24.2

 

The players we traded

Watkins- 13.2 (cost of 5th year option)

Darius- 16

Glenn-15

Tyrod-16

Total-60.2

 

The retirement

Wood- 9

 

Players we kept

Mccoy-9

Clay-9

Hughes-10.4

K Williams- 5.5

Total 33.9

 

The total for that core group of players that our 2016 roster was built around would have been 127.3 million in 2018

 

Leaving 50 Million to sign 2017 rookies, 2018 rookies and fill a total of 41 other roster spots an impossible task.

 

 

 

 

Good post, however I mean currently we are holding a 53 man roster with 53 million in dead cap because we cut/traded players early on their contracts.  So the end of the whole story is it's not an impossible task, we're doing it right now.

[Pine Barrens Mafia]

7 hours ago, Peter said:

 

I am good. I always have been good.  

 

Lel

[BeginnersMind]

The only thing Beane could not have planned for is that two pro bowl lineman retire in one off season. 

 

The rest of this cap hell he saw coming and had to swallow. We talked last year about how it would be tough this season. Now the team that was -57 in point differential last year lost two pro bowl linemen unpredictably, is starting two rookies at the QB position on their respective sides of the ball...and go figure: they are struggling. 

 

It will take years to build this. If the Bills are not remarkably better after 2020-21 season, this regime screwed up. Next year will be good draft picks and hopefully a good FA off season. The guys they signed this year are all on short deals in anticipation of next year. 

 

What wont work: Another short term coach hiring and firing. That is the Bills disaster. 

 

To those who who think they should have kept Watkins, Dareus, Tyrod, Darby, I ask: For what reason? This team is maybe a 6-7 win team with them, picking #10 in the draft, and still cap-handcuffed. I’d rather deal with the 3 win season and have a top 3 pick and have a ton of space next year. 

 

So suck it up fans. Look at the young kids and see how they are doing, and dream of next year. This season is all about growth and process. Winning an odd game here or there will just be icing on the turd of talentless players and bloated contracts that Rex and Whaley handed us. 

 

 

Edited September 18, 2018 by BeginnersMind

[DabillsDaBillsDaBills]

Beane inherited a team that had 1 awful contract (Dareus) and a handful of highly paid vets that in general were not bad contracts. The overall situation really wasn't that bad. 

 

He greatly exacerbated the cap situation by trading away Dareus, Glenn, and Tyrod (and more, but those are the biggest hits). When a player is traded you're not really trading away their contract, you're just turning the contract into dead cap. In Dareus's case we saved a measly 2 mil against the cap by trading him. 

 

 

[CountDorkula]

11 hours ago, Jauronimo said:

Wishing for people to fail isn't as bad as shitting in a napkin and then strategically placing human waste to ruin someone's shoes and pants.  This sounds like personal growth for Limeaid.

I guess when you look at it that way, it shows tremendous amounts of growth. now if we could only get josh Allen to show this much growth.

[SlimShady'sSpaceForce]

yes it was bad but the future is brighter 

 

BILLS 2019 CAP TOTALS

• Maximum Salary Cap:$195,255,109
• Active Contracts:$102,866,980
• Dead Cap:$2,320,775
• Total Cap:$105,187,755
• Est. Cap Space:$90,067,354
•  

 

BILLS 2020 CAP TOTALS

• Maximum Salary Cap:$187,000,000
• Active Contracts:$55,782,375
• Total Cap:$55,782,375
• Est. Cap Space:$131,217,625

55 players under contract through 2019 

36 players  under contract through 2020 

24 players  under contract through 2021

 

Est. Cap Space:$131,217,625  

 

 

 

Edited September 18, 2018 by ShadyBillsFan

[Big Gun]

2 hours ago, BeginnersMind said:

The only thing Beane could not have planned for is that two pro bowl lineman retire in one off season. 

 

The rest of this cap hell he saw coming and had to swallow. We talked last year about how it would be tough this season. Now the team that was -57 in point differential last year lost two pro bowl linemen unpredictably, is starting two rookies at the QB position on their respective sides of the ball...and go figure: they are struggling. 

 

It will take years to build this. If the Bills are not remarkably better after 2020-21 season, this regime screwed up. Next year will be good draft picks and hopefully a good FA off season. The guys they signed this year are all on short deals in anticipation of next year. 

 

What wont work: Another short term coach hiring and firing. That is the Bills disaster. 

 

To those who who think they should have kept Watkins, Dareus, Tyrod, Darby, I ask: For what reason? This team is maybe a 6-7 win team with them, picking #10 in the draft, and still cap-handcuffed. I’d rather deal with the 3 win season and have a top 3 pick and have a ton of space next year. 

 

So suck it up fans. Look at the young kids and see how they are doing, and dream of next year. This season is all about growth and process. Winning an odd game here or there will just be icing on the turd of talentless players and bloated contracts that Rex and Whaley handed us. 

 

 

He knew about Wood in January and there was plenty of time to address it. Oh wait he did with Bodine, I guess McBeane should have done better than that, which he could have but chose not to.