Your fear of 'salary cap hell' is dumbfounding. How many teams in the league have issues with the salary cap. Teams have issues with payroll because they have cheap owners. The salary cap is going up faster than teams can keep up with. Every team aside from the Washington Redskins is under the salary cap for next year. Nobody NEEDS to cut any players. The market is saturated, so you will pay more money. But the salary cap ramifactions will always be the same. Its simple economics. Carey is going to be asking for the same amount of money in 2-3 years. The Redskins, which are the most extreme example you can use, are only about 7mil over the cap right now. They will cut Brandon Lloyd, Shawn Springs, and maybe one other, and will be back UNDER the cap. They will definitely be going after one of the 3 available CBs.
Keep in mind, the Redskins are an extreme example. We are talking about the Dolphins signing a CB in his prime. The Redskins signed players like Deion Sanders and Bruce Smith (mid 30s). Its the equivolent of a team throwing a lot of money at Zach.
There are ways to work around the cap, but you only have so much money to spend. We have 40 mil now, but if we spend it all now we won't have 40 mil next year when a new batch of FA's become available. We will be hard pressed to resign player and sign new players, the dodging that some teams do with the cap eventually catches up to them. We are starting over with a clean slate, why handicap ourselves by making the cap an issue?
I am not aware of a situation in which the Redskins' salary cap has not allowed them to fill a hole or impact their drafting somehow. They are the most extreme example, and you will be hard pressed to find a situation in which their wild spending really effected anything other than Dan Snyder's pocket.
Well, their spending only left them 2.5 mil under the cap in '06 (Washington Post). How many top level players can you get with that wad of cash?
Then there's this from the Washington Post from a few years ago on Washington's cap situation.
After another offseason of lavish spending on free agents, the Washington Redskins have assembled the highest-paid team in NFL history, leading officials with several NFL teams to predict that Coach Joe Gibbs has a two-year window to win a fourth Super Bowl before facing a salary cap crisis that would force him to jettison many of his best players.
Officials around the NFL are watching the developments in Washington with interest, several of them said, as Redskins owner Daniel Snyder pushes the boundaries of the salary cap, the annual limit on the amount each team can spend on salaries and bonuses, by deferring payments until the out-years of players' contracts.
Yet, several officials from other NFL clubs who have looked at Washington's salary structure said they believe the bills on the Redskins' offseason spending will come due sooner than the Washington front office predicts.
"To me what they're saying is they are banking on really winning in the next two years," said an executive who manages the salary cap for one NFL club, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They just aren't going to be able to keep all those guys, they really aren't. There's nothing wrong with building for a run to the Super Bowl, but you're only kidding yourself to say you're not going to suffer the consequences of overextending in the free agent market. It's mathematically impossible."
What Washington and other teams that try to skirt the cap do is they sign players to front loaded deals and pay high priced FA's "roster bonuses" that will be payed out 2 or 3 years down the road. Well, sooner or later those bonuses count against the cap even if a player is no longer with the team.
Doing that type of thing is risky and for a team that feels that they are in a "win now" mode it might be an option. But that isn't what the Miami Dolphins are about, we are a rebuilding team and the playoffs aren't even realistic at this point.
Big IF here. And if you want to argue that Samuel is a product of his system, then atleast say why. Its a legitimate argument you can make, but such a broad statement isn't very convincing. Personally, i look for two things in players; toughness and smarts. Samuel has both. What the Patriots asked of their CBs is going to be pretty much the same as we would. He is just a good all around football player.
Okay
There is no doubt that Asante is a good player, but he seems to be more of a product of NE's defense and overall talent and he may not be able to produce the same way in another location. Part of what makes New England such a tough team to play is that they switch up their coverages. Instead of playing a standard 3/4, they will throw different looks at you in order to confuse you. Sometimes they play zone, sometimes they play cover 2, etc and that helps to confuse the offense leading to turnovers. Asante has been on the receiving end of alot of those turnovers the past few years, but is it him or is it the system?
Also the Dolphins want CB's that are good against the run, one of the things that makes Will Allen a very good CB for us is the fact that he is good in run support. As far as Asante goes, he just isn't that good.
Then you need to consider that he is more concerned with $$$ than with the team concept. That's one of the things that Pats fans have been pointing out for well over a year now. Little known fact, but he has a tattoo on his arm that translates to "Get Payed". I would feel much better about him if he had a tattoo on his arm that translated to "Play Hard".
I'm not going to debate over labels like 'rebuilding' and 'retooling'. Just arguing semantics. I believe you are always BUILDING. Constantly. Every off season you have to improve, because other teams are. You don't stand pat.
Absolutely, but when you tear down the structure to start over, that's rebuilding. When you try to add big names on the fly in the hopes of winning now (like the Redskins) that's retooling. They are two different approaches that give two different results.
So long as you draft well, you will always have a good team. Regardless of what mistakes you make in free agency. Whatever you do in free agency is supplementary.
Not true, there are cap concerns to consider.
Say we sign Samuel, Adams and Faneca to a big 5 year contracts (not out of the realm of possiblity that they are looking for 5 year deals). 2 years from now we have to cut Adams because of his age and declining abilities because we can't justify paying him the amount of money he is slated to make. Then a year after that we have to do the same thing with Faneca. So in 3 years we lose 2 of the 3 players that we sign this offseason, the only thing is we don't lose that signing bonus money against the cap. Even though we won't have those two players going into year 4, they will still count against our cap and reduce the amount of money that we will have to spend in FA and resigning our own players. That scenerio doesn't even take into account resigning Carey to a big deal, resigning Ronnie, signing our rookies who may be top 5 picks for the next 2 or 3 years or acquiring more players via FA between now and that hypothetical year 4.
If you do that often enough, you find yourself in cap hell very quickly.
If there are any cap guys out there that can add to this or correct me, feel free.
