Quote:
Originally Posted by rubecube
It's not really wizardry. It's just basic restructuring/extending and kicking the can down the road to a future date. Roseman has been doing it with the Eagles for years.
It's not a big deal if you draft well and have good core of players locked in. The problem comes when those players age/decline and there's nothing waiting in the pipeline because it can be hard to jettison those players to get significant relief.
Eventually you have to take your lumps and do a rebuild or at least retool where you're not going to be competitive for a couple of years, but as long as you have a decent window open, it's not super difficult to maneuver.
The big problem for teams like the Eagles and Rams is they bet on the wrong players and (in the Eagles' case) have drafted poorly/failed to develop their younger players.
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Yeah exactly. This team is still living off that killer 2017 Draft (and to a lesser extent, 2016), but they haven't had a good draft since then. Their 2020 draft was a straight up tire fire. And trading 2 first rounders to move up to snag the inconsistent, oft-injured DE Marcus Davenport in 2018 looks like a colossal error. Stuff like that is how your team erodes away from being a contender.
I also think the plan by Loomis was assuming the cap would keep increasing every year, so by the time Brees retired and you have to pay the piper and take that hit, that the cap would be large enough where Saints could just absorb it and be ok. But of course Covid changed all of that. Going to be a wild off-season, that's for sure.