The aggressive nature of your posts, and complete lack of objectivity makes having an adult conversation pointless.
BRAD SMART- YOU DUMB PERIOD!!!
Signing top free agents isn’t a mistake, never was, never will be! Paying guys like Trey Flowers with a 4th round pedigree, a low RAS, a career high of 7.5 sacks (I think) and from a “system” was a mistake. I agree… I’d like to avoid these too… 90M was also an absurd amount.
To any objective fan…. Benito Nones nor Kindle Vildor should be starting in an NFCC, but they are. The reason? A guy who missed 7 games per season for 3 years PRIOR to this year… started his singing here with a torn ACL, and got hurt.
What about Benito? We started out possibly hoping another UDFA who was a guy off the street was pencilled in, until he wasn’t (Buggs)
yes we initially NEEDED guys like Comish, Raymond, Buggs, Jacobs, C Harris to eat up snaps….playing unprepared rookies and inviting chaos would have been a far worse strategy then getting some “lunch box” guys a 2nd shot in the league.
Those guys are 1.5-2M a year fillls… like Elliott, E Brown, and like C Harris and Comish were initially.
If you pay guys like Comish 6.7M, Harris 5M, Romeo 5M next year…. And only one will actually BE HERE… and this year we paid about 15M to them…
Why?
That’s 31M so over 2 years for about 800-900 combined snaps and 5-6 combined sacks.
Charles Harris was signed when we had NOTHING at edge. And were playing the 3-4 which he is a fit for and he was a stud there.
Romeo Okwara was coming off a 10 sack season. Are you kidding me he was a no brainer to resign. He blew out his Achilles 2021,2022 was still recovering. 2023 he is back and is grading out quite well.
Don’t forget we got Aidan Hutchinson in there 2022 knocks everybody down a role.
Cominsky was an epic waiver claim that won the run stuffing DE job over 2nd round Paschal and has been a nice rotational piece there and inside at DT.
Yes we need some more interior pass rush and juice off the edge…
Doesn’t mean Brad made the wrong decisions at the time though.
You have to be very, very smart about it though. 80+% of the big signings don’t live up to their salaries. You can make a list of the highly-paid guys who hit since FA started and I can make a list of the guys who didn’t, and my list would be roughly four times as long. Neither one of us wants to spend the time to do that - especially today - but you should be able to intuit that it’s about that just with a cursory glance.
(There are likely to be far more hits in the range Brad has been shopping in, because the expectations aren’t as extreme).
Now that doesn’t mean you don’t take a chance on a guy when you think he’s the right one. BUT, and this is a big but and one very few in here seem willing to consider, but you have to go into it willing to admit that you might be wrong. Have confidence, believe in your evaluations, but know that even the best of all time get it wrong, a lot. Brad has been a badass so far, but he will get it wrong. (And he has, just not so much in the draft.)
If you go into it with that attitude, ON TOP of our imminently rising roster bill AND all of the other things our FO looks for in a prospective Detroit Lion - football intelligence, desire, commitment, non-turdity - our list of candidates shrinks considerably. You’re going to mitigate your numbers at the top. You just are.
I want us to pivot to the annual comp pick formula surplus stage of the roster building strategy. I still feel like the Ravens way of doing business is our archetype. We just weren’t there yet.
Right, and when you’re a good team and a desirable FA spot, you can wait out the expensive wave of FA and sign a guy like Clowney late for less than what he wants. I think we’ll be entering that territory this offseason. Everyone’s gonna want to play for Dan.
Sure. You can’t keep paying guys moving forward for whet they did yesterday. That’s what I’m saying.
We can keep having 20-30M in dead cap every year, and keep suggesting we can’t afford top players? To further compound it, if we keep paying role players, solid every down starter money, we will minimize how many impact players we can pay.
Harris was an awesome find… but once we decided to move away from the 3-4 scheme he performed in, and decided to pay 7.5M per was a mistake.
Yes Romeo was coming off 10 sacks, but 13.5 per was a lot…. I don’t think he profiled as a good starter on a good team.
We did what we did to get here. I get that.
Josh- 7 plus
Jonah- 8 plus
Ceedy- 8 plus
Glass- 6 plus
Walker- 12 plus
Comish- near 7
The bottom 2 are on books, top 4 are my best guesses.
That’s about 50M… near 40M next year alone if we “run it back”
We’d have the draft, but these would eat up most of cap along with extensions etc.
I also think betting on a guy fits our culture as well. That’s why I like Yiadom. Will be reasonably cheap but comes with boba fixes in ST and high level play in a similar system on the outside in a small sample size.
I’m not as big a fan of him as you, but I absolutely think he’s just the kind of guy we’ll be interested in. For the reasons you listed. And as a piece in the CB room, I’m fine with it.
I love that you have an elite gunner floor with him. PFF loved him last year and whenever I saw him on the outside he was in position and feisty at the catch point. I’m just not a fan of paying another 10-11m for a second Sutton level player and I highly doubt we’ll be into Snead at 20m per.
No idea. I was assuming 2/8m or something like that. Going to be 28 so you may be able to get him for 1 year if he think he has a shot to get a lot of run at corner and wants to take a bet on himself. He’s running out of time so I’m not sure what he and his agent’s posture will be.