Post Lockout moves

[Icness]

Williams had the problem of being a backup DB that wasn't a great special teams player. Same reason he didn't stick in New Orleans.

Maybe they can take back Fairley's money. He's never going to earn one dime of it.

[Blkbrd671]

Anyone know whats going on with samuels on the eagles. what you guys think about adding him?

[kellmellus50]

A report on profootballtalk.com says the Lions are one of seven teams over the salary cap (by $5 million

and are in a situation where they'll have to cut or restructure contracts to get under the cap by today

From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20110804/SPO ... z1U414jpqs

[Icness]

Mo Morris making almost $2M, there's some savings right there if they whack him. Awful expensive for a #3 RB esp. one with a broken hand.

I wonder if they have the cojones to cut Jason Hanson. His cap figure is $2.2M and they love Rayner.

Sounds like Stafford and KVDB are willing to restructure.

Raiders are $18M over the cap after the Wimbley signing.

[TSE]

That's not good after losing Nnamdi and Zack Miller. Poor Oakland fans.

[ajaX82]

18 million over? Good lord...

[TSE]

http://www.silverandblackpride.com/2011 ... cap-issues

Good article on some restructure options that Oakland could do to combat the number. Same idea of what I was talking about with CJ or with restructuring Stafford's contract which to me is the #1 most flukey and needing to be changed contract on the team. I mean the other choice is to ask Suh to take a paycut cause he is the other ultra high draft pick that has big money, but seeing as he is Suh and Stafford is not Suh, I see no reason to talk about Suh giving money, I'd rather not take a cent from him and use the value of not asking Suh to restructure as leverage to get him to give us a fair deal on his next contract. Stafford I will roll the die with on that negotiation moreso than Suh, so now's a good time to reconcile Stafford's contract so that one day in the future he can't Osi us.

Also, Avril signed his 1 year tender.

[ajaX82]

Also, Avril signed his 1 year tender.

Good, glad to have him back. I bet they get going on a long term deal now

[Icness]

It's not uncommon for big-ticket QBs to restructure. Both Mannings have done it, Big Ben did it less than a month after signing his last one. Stafford's deal is friendly enough now that he can move some money around.

BTW nice link TSE even though it's a couple weeks old. Some teams do stuff like that all the time, then they take a "pay the piper" year and start doing it again. Cleveland and Washington are notorious for running the cap that way. Note they aren't exactly successful franchises...

[TSE]

Yeah I mainly posted it since it was an example for them that can help others see a potential Lion's version in mind with our highest paid players, plus it's interesting to see Oakland's list and how it played out. You can get ideas of how they might have saved NA or ZM and who else it could have cost them instead to save those guys. It's good practice for us to look at a screwed up team like them and examine the problems so that we can have ideas on how to avoid what they did.

Also the netrat lions salary cap link is a good place for anybody that wants an Excel sheet of the Lion's payroll...
http://www.thenetrat.com/salarycap.html

[Collymore]

Oh, $20.3M. Stafford got a bigger cap hit than Manning and Brady? I like Stafford but I see your point TSE.

[TSE]

Yeah you can't get emotional with your players. If you were playing Texas Holdem and it came down to the last card and you need 1 specific card for your straight to win certainly or to lose certainly if you don't get it, well you know the odds of getting that one card. If you can imagine the percents hanging over your draw hand compared to the other guy like they show you on TV, well then the only way to play the hand is to put money into the pot only if you get the same proportional return or more as what your percentage draw is. If the other guys bets double that amount and prices you out, then you can't go with your gut and hope your straight draw pans out. It only is a viable strategy up to a certain amount before the proportions of value are distorted. Well we just changed the rookie scale, look at what a guy like Cam Newton got compared to Bradford and Stafford. You'd have to be an idiot to not want to figure this out in advance, and then not want to strategize in advance to find a way to prevent being trapped and forced to play with an awful pot odds situation that you are FORCED to call, despite the fact that it violates the logic of your best interests.

And then not only can you win by preparing in advance, but all 31 other teams have a failing grade at LONG TERM strategy in this league. Which means that you can not only limit your future penalties, but you can STEAL future gains from the field of teams that mismanage their long-term porftolios.

That's why this is a situation we see come up from time to time where the concept of evaluation Stafford as a draft pick is not appropriate to do in the conventional sense. Normally if you pick a guy, say at the perfect slotted spot that he belongs, well if he pans out then you did good with the pick, and if he doesn't then you did bad with the pick. Same with that poker hand if you have a viable draw at the end. If the guy makes a bet that requires you to have a 10% chance to win, and if you evaluate your hand and find it's lower, you should fold to have done a good, and you should call if your percentage is north of 10%. Suppose in this case there is $100 in the pot, you need a 9 to win, and the guy bets say 1 million dollars. The only logical choice is to fold. You can't justify the call under ANY scenario. Suppose the fool does call, and let's say he gets his 9 and now he wins the WHOLE pot. Well in the NFL, a fan would say he's a hero, they only examine the end result. Well in LOGIC, that move was a guaranteed FAIL regardless of the outcome. It becomes illogical to accept that the choice can pan out to justify the choice at decision making time.

That's why with a guy like Titus Young, we can evaluate him and Mayhew in the future can possibly win or lose on his GM scorecard depending on how that plays out. He was drafted at an appropriate market price, we know the rookie costs went way down, so while still overpaid, the percentage of efficiency loss is much less, that it's closer to a real and legitimate "playing hand" so to speak that will have a logical relationship with other constructs that it meshes with in the big picture, which is not so much the case with guys with bloated contracts. So one guy can play to prove a GM scorecard right, but Stafford can not. If Stafford plays poor or great, in neither case can you justify the pick, cause they were 100% disqualified as logical options that should have ever have been considered back at that decision making moment. As soon as the choice was made, nothing can ever be done to undo that wrong, and therefore it's an automatic penalty to the team. It's inescapable to say that drafting Matt Stafford was bad for the team, regardless of who the man is and how good he might be at football. The bastardization of our logical decision making process has rendered that traditional question to be moot!

The most horrifying thing to me isn't that we drafted Stafford though. It's that we DIDN'T trade him last year when the NFL had flukey rules that would have allowed us to finagle the cap space in unique ways and we could have ripped off the rest of the league and scored a massive future haul in value by not only strategically subbing Stafford out then, and taking advantage in dozens of other player transactions that would have taken advantage of that once in a lifetime loophole advantage. That's ridiculous to me that they never processed what was in our team's best interest and did any of the obvious no brainer choices that absolutely had to be made, and on double order considering the other teams in the league were passive and adding to the exploitable value gains because of their choosing not to scoop up advantages for themselves through that loophole.

[Collymore]

The way the contract is structured the cap hit should be quite a few millions lower the next years, right? I can't say I fully understand how the cap hit works with all the rules but his salary is alot lower.

[TSE]

Well it's less of an issue now. We've already burned through the majority of the value we could have received from dealing him. It's like buying a new car, every year it depreciates away in value as a whole, and on top of that some of the side benefits from the transaction of making that deal has evaporated away as well. If a QB has 15 years of NFL life, well so far we've already burned a couple of years of Stafford for no SBs, so that's 2/15 of his value we've already pissed away by not choosing to win with him or trade him to somebody that would. We blew it bigtime with that pick, already suffered some of the losses, and are still on trace to have more losses from this point forward as compared with the non-Stafford path from this time forward. All the more reason to know at the time you make the decision that you need to stay off of these TERRIBLE value paths. Our best decision is still to trade him, but that now becomes a less significant salvage value at this point. It's awful football business to manufacture a future scenario for yourself where your most logical move is to abandon the ship that you designed because the specs aren't strong enough to secure the ride.

That's like a dad deciding to put his kids in a paddle-boat to travel across the Atlantic for their trip to Europe, and then 20% of the way he decides not to turn back or alter the solution but says well we're 80% there now, and eventually we will be 60%, and the further and further it goes, the less salvage gains you have to rectify the bad mistake, and the less apt you are to bail out and ultimately you end up more likely to finish it off and see it through. But heck even at 90%, it would still be better to stop the trip or radio for help, as even 10% of the way in a paddle-boat is still a NEGATIVE NET decision albeit a much SMALLER negative net decision than the total amount present at the beginning of the trip. As a GM, you can't put your team in that position, yet we intentionally did that. That's not logical.

[Liqourish]

So wading through all of TSE's mumbo jumbo.... we restructured Staffords and KVBs contracts?

[Bartender]

So wading through all of TSE's mumbo jumbo.... we restructured Staffords and KVBs contracts?

That's the word from the unreliable mouths called media.

[TSE]

Lions picked up DE Cody Brown, just a couple years removed from being a late 2nd round draft pick. He didn't work out in the 3-4 system, so now we have our Turk replacement or at least somebody interesting to give Willie Young some legit competition. He hasn't appeared in an NFL game in his first 2 years though, but his college stats were decent.

[ajaX82]

Apparently we are interested in signing Leonard Davis, formerly of Dallas. PFT says he could be had for a one year deal, so a low risk upgrade perhaps?

[Icness]

Davis is toast. I'm always very wary of picking up players that were discarded by teams that have pressing needs at the position of the released player. Dallas has one of the worst OL in the league, yet they couldn't wait to get rid of Davis and money was no object.

Cody Brown suffering from the negative karma of stiffing me for an interview. Same deal with him, Arizona and the Jets both need pass rushers and both quickly parted ways.

[TSE]

WTF Brown is not even listed on the roster! I just realized this when I made my cut list I never even thought of him cause I reverted back to the Lions roster to remind me of who we have on the team. It's so confusing to figure out who we have, is he the only one not listed or are there more??? Damn it, why can't this team figure out a way to update their transactions and roster, he's also not listed on the transactions page! WTF is it there for?????????

And over the years I seem to have heard tons of complaints from Dallas about how bad Davis sucks, plus he had an atrocious number of penalties. So I like his size and his PB history, but I don't know anything about the man and where he's at now. I would love to render my opinion on adding him or not, but in this case I'm too ignorant and would have no way of being able to figure him out without having the tools and inside information, so that's all for Mayhew to decide. If he sees enough for him to be worth competing then that's a good sign, if not then I'm sure we aren't losing much. I don't know any of our OL players that he could start over, so I assumed he would be talked to about being the backup G in case Sims or Peterman got hurt.