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I guess Paul Depodesta was correct when he said Wentz was not a franchise QB. He made that statement when Wentz was being drafted and was roundly criticized about it by some on this board.

What rotten luck!
Gotta feel sorry for the guy. Lost all that money AND is probably not a FQB. Bad pizza. smh

2023 NFL free agency: Ranking best free agent crops from every team as Eagles, Bills lead top-heavy list

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/...eam-as-eagles-bills-lead-top-heavy-list/

15. Cleveland Browns
Top free agents: Deion Jones (LB), Kareem Hunt (RB), Jacoby Brissett (QB), D'Ernest Johnson (RB), Jadeveon Clowney (EDGE)

The Browns don't have a great crop of free agents, but a group of players that would be beneficial to a roster. Jones had a career resurgence in his half season with the Browns and is worth monitoring in free agency. Hunt and Johnson are looking for expanded roles in their next offense as Hunt can still be a No. 1 running back in the right system. Brissett will be one of the best No. 2 quarterbacks on the market.

Hunt and Johnson are intriguing running backs in a crowded market, which elevates this class.

It seems like the cap is such an fluctuating thing that can be manipulated however possible to never have it be an issue lol

I still am angry with the fact that we lost to the Falcons and Jets last year within 3 weeks. Just unacceptable

Watching Hunt leave will hurt. I love that guy. TBH, I think he's only moderately less impressive than Chubb. I would be fine with Hunt as our 1 in a world were Chubb was not.

The Browns are not listed as a Best Team Fit for any of these top available free agents. Not knowing whether any of these players are on the Browns radar or not, does this indicate that the Browns will have to overpay to secure any of these free agents coming to Cleveland? With as many holes as the Browns have on defense, you'd think at least one of the top defensive positions would have Cleveland as a potent6ial landing spot - but not according to this article.

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/...-available-free-agent-at-every-position/

Well, Bonefish, we should all recognize that these types of articles are much easier to write at this point in the season. It is the story they want to write, but I won't stoop so low as to call it journalism. Just some artificial sports noise that can run any day of the week, and signifies less than nothing IMO. Desperate for a sale, apparently any sale. Can't swing cat nowadays without hitting multiple self-appointed and self-anointed" experts, reputations are as artificial as their hype. Nothing to see here. Easier to jigger up and manufacture "news" than it is to report it.

j/c:

No source on Lance, quick computer check lead to ZERO stories on Lance being gone. Personal opinion.

Did you watch the video? It was designed to be humorous.

It's an accounting tool. Saints have been doing this forever...

Notoriously. They were 100M over last year and 55M this year. The GM talks about "working their way back towards the middle" as casually as a wrestler talks about cutting weight before the next match.

Somehow it's never the dire straights people make it out to be... or the Saints would have filed Chapter 11 a few years ago.

NFL salary cap cuts 2023: Team-by-team tracker of players released into NFL free agency

https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl...nfl-free-agency/cemegysldgcsk2xfqqvvz86c

Ahhh, this is what happens when you keep "kicking that can down the road"


Taysom Hill’s restructured contract might make a Broncos trade tough to pull off
John Sigler
Sun, March 5, 2023 at 3:52 PM EST

So how long will it take Sean Payton to trade for Taysom Hill? That’s been a common refrain in the weeks since Payton was hired as the Denver Broncos’ new head coach, and it’s easy to see why — he made no secret of his appreciation for Hill’s game when they were together on the New Orleans Saints. Hill was one of Payton’s favorite players in black and gold, and it kind of does feel like only a matter of time until he’s wearing navy and orange. He joked about trading for Hill before he even accepted Denver’s offer.

But the Saints’ decision to restructure Hill’s contract may have bought them some more time with No. 7. By converting most of Hill’s base salary into a signing bonus, they reduced his 2023 salary cap hit to just $6,869,000. But the downside (for interested Broncos fans, and possibly Payton) is that trading Hill now becomes cost-prohibitive for much of the offseason.

The Saints would have to fork over an addition $15,826,000 in salary cap penalties if they traded Hill before June 1 after this restructure, meaning he would be going to another team and leaving behind $22,695,000 in dead money on New Orleans’ spreadsheet. Denver would have to pay a ridiculously steep price in draft picks to make that worthwhile for the Saints. It just isn’t realistic, and it insures Hill will stay in New Orleans for the immediate future.

We aren’t out of the woods yet, though. If the Saints trade Hill after June 1, they will actually save a little money with a new team (like the Broncos) paying his $1,080,000 base salary. They’d be left with $5,789,000 in dead money this year and a staggering $16,906,000 next year, but they could be sweet-talked into accepting that if the compensation is strong enough. But you have to imagine Broncos general manager George Paton would step in and stop Payton from bartering with the first- or second-round picks it would probably take to get New Orleans to offload Hill.

And they didn’t have to do this restructure. If the Saints were open to trading Hill this offseason, it would have made more sense to leave his contract alone (with its $13,925,000 cap hit) until after June 1, at which point they could have traded him to another team like Denver and saved $9.9 million against the cap, fully getting him off their hands. That isn’t the route they chose, though.

So, what does this mean? By restructuring Hill’s contract, the Saints have basically reinvested in him and made it clear that he’s in their plans moving forward. And he should be. There have been times when he was the most exciting player on the field with a fleur-de-lis on their helmet. He took over some games last season and proved he can be an asset with a heavier workload so long as the vision for his role is clear. Hopefully offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael doesn’t take so long to get him up to speed in 2023. The Saints are paying Hill too much money to have him on the sidelines.

Reality of Just "KICKING THAT CAN DOWN the ROAD." How soon does this reality hit the Browns? The Browns are going full speed down this road and the window is closing extremely fast. A swing and miss in 2023 would be disastrous going forward for the Browns.


It looks like the Bucs may be admitting defeat, and that’s a good thing
John Romano, Tampa Bay Times
Sat, March 4, 2023 at 9:00 AM EST

TAMPA — There’s an old joke about a man who asked his brother to housesit his cat while he goes on a family vacation. When the man calls home to check on everything, the brother blurts out that the cat has died.

“For goodness sakes,” the man cries, “couldn’t you have thought of a better way to break the news? Tell me the cat climbed on the roof and wouldn’t come down. Tell me you called the fire department for assistance. Tell me the cat fell and broke its back. Tell me the vet had to put the poor thing down.”

The brother apologized profusely for being so insensitive.

A day later, the man called home for an update.

“Well,” the brother says, “mom climbed on the roof and won’t come down …”


It’s that time of the year for football fans in Tampa Bay. The games are completed, the draft is still weeks away and unbridled passion has taken a well-deserved holiday. Except for this:

The quarterback has climbed on the building’s roof at One Buc Place …

Really, there’s no softer way to break the news. The evidence suggests the Bucs are heading for a rebuild, even if the people in charge are hesitant to enunciate it quite so boldly.

Tom Brady has left and is not coming back. Roughly half the defense is heading to free agency, and the salary cap situation is unsightly. The Bucs do not have a cache of high draft picks and the jury is still out on the head coach and the first-year offensive coordinator. Shaquil Barrett, Mike Evans, Ryan Jensen and Shaq Mason will all be in their 30s, and the Bucs are coming off a season in which they were outscored for the first time since 2018.

Other than that, everything is spiffy.

Recent headlines suggest plans for the remodeling are already underway. Leonard Fournette, Cameron Brate, Donovan Smith and Ryan Succop could all be released in the coming days, and that will be a savings of more than $19 million on the salary cap. That sounds promising, except the Bucs would still have another $36 million to trim.

And that’s before signing any free agents or draft picks.

Now, there’s a school of thought that the Bucs could manipulate the salary cap with contract renegotiations that spread the pain over the coming seasons. And those kind of maneuvers absolutely made sense in 2020. And 2021. Even in 2022.

But it would be foolhardy today.

When Brady was here, the Bucs owed it to themselves to jump through whatever hoops possible to maximize their chances of winning with a once-in-a-lifetime quarterback. And that’s exactly what they did. Tampa Bay had three consecutive playoff appearances, two division titles and one Super Bowl to show for it.

They also ended up with the bloated salary cap situation you see today.

When asked about financial constraints by reporters at the NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis, general manager Jason Licht basically described a rebuild in the most optimistic way possible.

“We’re still trying to restock and eventually build another championship team and it’s just going to look a little different and be done a little bit differently,” Licht said. “We were in a position in 2020, after we won the Super Bowl, to be able to re-sign all of our players, which hadn’t been done, or hadn’t been done in a very long time. The goal is eventually to get back into a position like that but, in the short term, we still want to win and compete for this division. And we think we can.

“We just want to do it without sacrificing our long-term plans, our long-term goals, as well. I think we can find a way to do both at the same time.”

The relative weakness of the NFC South might make it tempting to cheat the Grim Bookkeeper one more time with salary cap shenanigans, but that’s a shortsighted plan. The Bucs are in no position to challenge for the next Super Bowl, and it makes no sense to jeopardize future seasons by gambling on another one-and-done playoff appearance.

Does that mean the Bucs should just give up on 2023? Not at all.

Their division really is winnable and, if they can avoid key injuries, the Bucs could conceivably finish somewhere around .500. They just can’t sacrifice the future to pull it off.

They’re better off finding out if quarterback Kyle Trask has a future in the league. If he shows promise, they’ll be one step closer to figuring out a new direction. If he bombs, they’ll likely be near the top of the 2024 draft and can go quarterback shopping at that point.

Either way, it’s time to face reality in Tampa Bay.

The glory days are dead. And that’s no joke.

The #Vikings are releasing veteran linebacker Eric Kendricks, per sources.

A first-team All-Pro in 2019 and one of the NFL’s most consistently productive LBs, Kendricks now heads to free agency.


https://twitter.com/TomPelissero/status/1632743065814220800?s=20

Link to above post.

I'm not sure exactly how Elliot's contract is structured but I think if practical his days are numbered with the Cowboys.

This is the second time I've heard rumors about the Titans shopping Henry. If true, it will be interesting to see what the market is for him. We might be doing the same w/Chubb next year.