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?