Wait, Your Point Was What?

by abender20 on Feb 3, 2009 8:22 AM PST in Seahawks News & Rumors

Danny O'Neil over at the Seattle Times has been doing some maths, and the result is astonishing: If your team gets to the Superbowl and any of your team's talented players are to become free agents, they won't all just resign for free. The apparent thesis of this piece is that participation in a Superbowl will lead to a financial crunch the year after, as players will want more money. As an example, the article uses the case of the post-XL Seahawks. I would imagine this will be straight to the point and clear, detailing just how much financial trouble the Cardinals will face this offseason. Let's see how this goes.

On Sunday, the Cardinals stood 2 minutes away from winning the sport's biggest prize. On Monday, they were a team with a quarterback who is unsigned for next season, a top-tier linebacker scheduled to be a free agent and three other star players who many around the league expect to ask Arizona to renegotiate their deals.

Apparently, we don't need to let the Cardinals fans enjoy their best season ever for more than 24 hours before smashing them in the forehead with a hard dose of reality.

After discussing the Hutchinson departure (it's never too late to take whatever blunt object is lying around and start pummeling a dead horse) and the case of Gibril Wilson and Kawika Mitchell from last year's Giants, we learn just how dire the Cardinal's financial situation will be:

So how will Arizona deal with the demand for its players? Arizona has tons of room on its payroll. The Cardinals are expected to be about $40 million below the salary cap when free agency begins at the end of the month.

Oh. I'm no cap expert, but that sounds like a lot of money. In fact, that would put Arizona in just about the best financial situation out of any team in the league. What was the point of this article again?

The decisions Arizona makes in the next month will determine whether its three playoff victories were the start of a new era of success or if Sunday's four-point loss to Pittsburgh will turn out to be as good as it gets.

Quite a few words later, we get to the point. If the Cardinals spend all of their cap room signing Jerome Bettis (please PLEASE get him off of our pregame shows), they will probably not get back to the Superbowl.

I started reading this article expecting to find some interesting parallels between the post-XL Hawks and the current Cardinals team. To be fair, there were one or two interesting points, but I'll be damned if that piece didn't have the same focus of Tracy Morgan in El Paso. Doesn't really matter what you wanted it to say, 'cause someone gon' get PREGNANT.

I don't know about you, but I'd feel pretty good going into the offseason after a Superbowl with the most cap room (give or take a million) in the NFL. Also, Fitzgerald has publicly stated he'd rework his contract to help get Boldin signed. Are the Cardinals really facing a major crunch?

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Seems kind of obvious that

if a team plays a bit higher than expecteted in the playoffs, its free agent talent will be overvalued because presumably they performed better than they were supposed to. Say their normal ‘Madden Rating’ is 85, but obviously their performance deviates from the mean sometimes, and they played like a 92 player for three games. Well that’s how they got into the playoffs in the first place. I think O’Neil just had to write something since there isn’t much to write about in sports at this time of the year for the city of Seattle.

Also,

The decisions Arizona makes in the next month will determine whether its three playoff victories were the start of a new era of success or if Sunday’s four-point loss to Pittsburgh will turn out to be as good as it gets.<

This is the case for many teams. You can spend years making the right moves and only have one Superbowl appearance to show for it, in many cases that one SB appearance is even a stretch. Look at Peyton Manning, he only has one superbowl appearance after several years of consistent success.

by LantermanC on Feb 3, 2009 8:46 AM PST reply actions

It sound like ownership may or may not elect to spend all the cap room.

Is he simply .pointing out post-SB player inflation and a cheap owner?

by Misfit74 on Feb 3, 2009 8:54 AM PST reply actions

pretty sure AZ has 15 FAs...

that’s what i heard on the radio yesterday, can’t find a link. if that’s the case, even having $40M in cap space isn’t going to do them all that much good. even if Fitz restructures to get Boldin more money (call that a break even?) they’re still going to struggle keeping that many players. I bet Darnell Dockett will be looking for something in the neighborhood of $8m/year, and as a defensive end who can play nose tackle he’s probably worth every penny.

Let’s hope the Cards are in a bad spot, because with our $9m in cap space it doesn’t sound like we will be reloading quite as fast as I would want to.

by cro-mag! on Feb 3, 2009 9:11 AM PST reply actions

Danny's losing it

I’ve noticed that some of Danny Oneil’s recent posts have been one of three things: unintelligible (your example), fairly obvious (see his post A Cautionary Tale about lending too much credence to reputation) or just downright strange (see his post Late Night Business Opportunity). But I do like the guy and I will continue to read his blog.

It really depends how the cards bounce back. Either the loss will temper their resolve to stay together and make another run at it next year, salaries be damned, or it will have destroyed morale and we’ll see an epic flood of players out of Arizona.

by Nick Andron on Feb 3, 2009 9:23 AM PST reply actions