Show me how many teams have went 0-16 and then made the playoffs with in 3 years . He started out pretty well. In later years he had a couple big misses that cost him his job, but was hired pretty quick by a pretty good 49ers team. Mayhew never became great but he no Millen or even close.
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Well this doesn’t take long to research. Only 2 teams have ever went 0 and 16 in nfl history and both made the playoffs 3 years later. The Browns even won a playoff game.
The 2008 Lions and 2017 Browns have so much in common it’s crazy.
Both had 4-0 preseasons
Both went 0-16
Both drafted qb’s first overall the next season
Both made the playoffs 3 years later
Pretty crazy
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Leaving on your own volition and rejecting a contract offer that was, by all accounts generious enough, and calling it being kicked out, is weird. I wonder why he used those words and why he views it as being kicked out?
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If I remember right, and it’s been awhile, but when I remember Mayhew saying was that basically they were taking a leap of faith with Suh. The Lions needed cap help, and they felt if they restructured him and got him more money up front, that Suh would remember that and be a little more team friendly when it came time to renew his deal. Suh played it for the leverage that it was, it stopped the Lions from being able to extend Suh under the franchise tag and assured he would become a free agent and able to negotiate to the highest bidder.
Here is an old article on NFL.com from Caldwell, where they called resigning Suh a top priority. Even in this article, Suh was already telling the Lions his agent would decide where he played next. Caldwell: Lions re-signing Suh one of highest priorities
Suh never misled the Lions. Suh was out for Suh, and I’ll never hold that against someone. He leveraged a situation that was best for him, made out like a bandit while doing so, and enjoyed a long career in the NFL. My issue is, don’t come back 10 years later and say you got pushed out. Say you made a decision that was best for you, but you always had good memories of your time in Detroit. Say you are happy to visit and see the original team that drafted you having success. To frame it as you never wanted to go and you were forced out, that’s just disingenuous. Which is actually pretty on brand for Suh.
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has it really been that long?! my goodness
probably 10, but I wanted the post to age well
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Great point. Imagine you worked for a company and they offered you $150,000 a year but you went somewhere else who paid you $175,000 a year and then coming back and saying they threw you out of the building. How ever were they able to fit his ego and body into the same locker room?
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Russ Thomas sucked for decades. The Ford’s replaced him with an in-house candidate who worked under Russ. So it wasn’t even the first time the team had done that.
Hell…Russ was an NFL player for the Lions and had moved into radio commentary. Then…made his way to GM of the Lions. Even that part of the story wasn’t new! 
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Mayhew definitely screwed up his franchise tag leverage. That was part of the issue.
Remembering the specifics of the Suh deal at the time needs to be mentioned. The Dolphins were irresponsible with the contract they offered him. They must have been in the “whatever it takes” mindset, and “we will cross that bridge when we get there.” It was a 5 year contract where they forwarded him tons of cash with low salary on the front end. A restructuring was inevitable the second we looked at the structure of the payouts. But the kicker was that Suh had the Dolphins by the balls. The cash he was making at the front end was beyond what the market rate was, and the salary levels packed into the backend of the deal were beyond what the market rate was. His salary + protated bonus wasn’t feasible, so the only way to push forward would be to forward Suh more cash to string out his cap hits (sound familiar?).
So even if someone offered Suh the same money, the way the Dolphins structured it made it a no brainer to take that deal over someone who wasn’t being dumb and desperate. The Head Coach got fired part-way into Suh’s first season and the GM got fired immediately after the season. At the time I can imagine how happy the Suh camp was, knowing Suh was about to make a bunch of money in a 2-3 year span and be able to get at least one more big bite at the apple in the free agent market. The big money 3rd deal never materialized, so he spent the rest of his career as a mercenary.
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The contract was structured in a way where Suh would never see the 4th year. He could only become a cap casualty. It was a 60 mil deal for 3 years and a whole bunch of irrelevant numbers that would never be realized after year 3.
Well, he came off a 11-5 season and choose to go to an 8-8 Dolphins over a couple million dollars. It was all money for him and that’s fine, his choice, but he shouldn’t blame Mayhew for his greediness
Back when this was happening, I was paying a lot of attention to the salary cap. We needed help, but there were other ways to get it. Mayhew/Lewand made a bad choice. You knew Suh was going to be about the $$$, it was clear as day. Without any restructures, his franchise tag would have been $19.225M, I thought that was high, but doable. In 2012, the restructure increased his franchise tag amount to $22M . . . Ok, that’s high, but the threat can probably still get a deal done with Suh, he is going to be about the money. In 2013, I was floored when they restructured him again and increased his tag amount to $27M, it was incompetent. If I was smart enough to figure this out, Mayhew/Lewand and the powers to be should have been. If Mayhew felt he was going to leave money on the table, he’s an idiot.
I always blamed Mayhew, because I KNOW he understood enough about the cap to know what he was doing. He bought a team in UFA instead of building through the draft and it became a house of cards. Good enough to win games and make playoffs, not good enough to build a solid foundation (i.e. what BH/MCDC has done) I blame Lewand for not making Mayhew do something other than restructure Suh’s contract twice.
It was actually a $19M APY contract that he got paid $20M APY over the first three years. It was front loaded, but it wasn’t that frontloaded. Even though Miami owed him $18M APY over the final three years of the contract, they cut him. It was just a bad contract.
Here’s the top IDL contracts adjusted for inflation:
Suh is 3rd all-time. Mayhew was right not to match it, but he should have never been in that position with Suh to begin with.
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I would add Mathew also had no Suh back up plan. Martin ended up trading for Ngata in 2015 giving up 4th and 5th rd. picks in 2016. The Ravens used our 4th rd. pick on DE Za’Darius Smith. Ngata was extended and brought back for 2016 and 2017 but shoulder injuries tarnished his time in Detroit. Ngata was 31 when Martin traded for him.
Monsters of the id.
You were absolutely right then, and proven right today. I agree the blame was on Mayhew. All he knew how to do was pay an employee the most amount of money, which while great for the employee, is rather terrible for the budget. I can honestly say I would have rather had you as GM and running the cap than Mayhew/Lewand.
I don’t like revisiting the bad days too much, but the fact I would rather have a knowledable fan run the team versus who WCF chose, shows how completely screwed up the Lions were under WCF. Tom Lewand was an admitted full blown alcoholic who had no clue what he was doing. In no world should that guy ever been made President of an NFL team. I believe Mayhew tried to do his best, but he was in way over his head and his decision making showed that. I’ve told my son this, in a league where it is specifically designed to help bad teams get good and to water down good teams to keep everyone packed as closely as possible for parity, the Lions somehow always managed to be a bottom feeder. That kind of result can only happen as a product of incompetent management. It’s the same reason why the Browns are never good, why Dallas is in major decline, and why the Bengals can fail with some of the most talented players in the league.
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I wish OTC or some other source would capture each salary cap year in a snapshot view that could be explored IN CONTEXT to that particular season. In other words, the way we are looking at the 2025 salaries (right now) could be archived to look exactly like they currently look without adjusting for what happens in 2026 and beyond. The context is what made the Suh deal so irresponsible (my words). We are in the year 2025 so the idea of a Defensive Tackle making $20M/year isn’t a big deal. But in the perspective of 2015, the overall salary cap and other player salaries at the time…it was nuts.
Thank you for showing the inflation adjusted feature on OTC. I had no idea that existed. Suh is still 3rd all-time. But its also important to remove Aaron Donald and any other contract that occured after 2015. JJ Watt had just signed a deal that made him the highest paid defensive player in the league…coming off a 2nd place finish in MVP voting and having a 20.5 sack season under his belt. His deal had a simple math average of $16.6M/year. Suh’s simple math average was $19M, which was a significant bump from Watt’s deal. Both of us realize that Watt’s deal wasn’t as “clean” as Suh’s deal, because Watt wasn’t a free agent like Suh. The reason why I am saying it was a “no brainer” for Suh and his agent to take the Dolphins deal comes down to the cash paid vs the cap situation the Dolphins put themselves in. Here is JJ Watt vs Suh in terms of cash paid:
JJ Watt 2014 Cash - $10.9M
JJ Watt 2015 Cash - $19.9M
JJ Watt 2016 Cash - $10.5M
JJ Watt 2017 Cash - $10.5M
JJ Watt 2018 Cash - $11M
JJ Watt 2019 Cash - $13M
N. Suh 2015 Cash - $26.5M
N. Suh 2016 Cash - $23.5M
N. Suh 2017 Cash - $9.9M
Suh collected enough money in the first 2 seasons to account for 4 seasons of what JJ Watt collected. It would take Watt 5 seasons to make what Suh was making in the first 3 seasons with the Dolphins. The Dolphins originally had a $28.5M salary for Suh in Year 2. That was obviously renegotiated, but it put more power in Suh’s hands. The situation was literally pushing the Dolphins into the same mistake that Mayhew made with Suh. In the first 3 seasons of the deal, they only accounted for $37.8M of Suh’s contract on their salary cap. Meaning, they had $76.5M to account for over the final 3 seasons…an eye watering $25.5M average. That is nearly identical to the total cap charges we took for Matt Stafford over the same 3 seasons ($26.1M, 2018-2020). It wasn’t just “QB money” in terms of cap charges, it was HIGH END QB money. And that doesn’t even tell the complete story about the situation the Dolphins put themselves in. The $25.5M average is watered down by the final year of the deal carrying a lower value. Suh’s cap hits for the 2018 and 2019 seasons where scheduled to be $26M and $28M.
The way the contract was initially structured and then restructured created a unique situation where Suh signed an above market deal…collected even more than that deal in real cash payments…AND the Dolphins would be forced to triple down on the last 3 years of the deal or release him at 30-31 years old for a chance at one more BIG bite at the apple.
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You’re making a mounting out of a molehill.
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the saying is : “your making a mountain out of a molehill.”
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