Thurman#1

Totally reasonable assumption. I know that there's never been a case where a guy didn't like his house and moved to another one in the same city. That's just never happened. So yeah, by far more likely that he's leaving his job. Nor has it ever happened that a football player decided that he and his family would live elsewhere in the offseason and he'd come back alone during the season and rent bachelor digs. Nor would that ever happen after a warm-weather guy and his family spend a Buffalo winter and decide to move the family at the end of that. So if Star's house is actually on the market and it's not just Lee Smith's house ... Clearly there's only one reasonable explanation for this.

Yup. Happily stuck.

Yes, if he were average, it'd be awful. As he's excellent, it's a good contract. They were visibly worse when he wasn't on the field. This is really good news.

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!!!

Doubt many of the rest can be had for vet min. That would be a significant cut for a bunch of them. And for guys at that kind of level they'd probably want to look around if offered vet min. Yeldon, for ex, is about $1.6 per year, Marlowe $1.5M, McKenzie will be looking for quite a bit more than vet min this year, and will deserve it. When given targets, he produced, he had five TDs, plus a punt RB for a TD. ESPN recently predicted 3 years and $10M, with the Bills. That might be a bit high this year, but if they offer vet min he's probably gone. And if they do let Roberts go, McKenzie becomes even more valuable to the FO. You left out Feliciano, who I think they re-sign for somewhere in the $3 - $4M range. Spotrac and SB Nation both predicted around $7M per year in FA. He wants to give them a deal, but you're likely dreaming if you think he takes a vet min kind of deal. Also doubt they go with Fromm in place of Barkley. Barkley ($2M a year) is a tremendous help to Josh, with a ton of veteran know-how and is also a lot more likely to handle himself better if there's an injury. Josh already knows a ton more than Fromm, who wasn't even in QB meetings last year, couldn't really throw the ball in anger last year as the COVID relief QB. If Barkley goes, they'll bring someone else in to replace him. And yeah, someone like Daryl Williams could easily go but if so, they'll almost surely bring in someone to replace him, and not a vet min guy either. Nonsense. Refusal to accept completely unsupported on-the-internet sources doesn't mean a reading comp problem. Speaks well to general comprehension of the world, IMO. I understand what you're saying about not wanting to out your source. It's not unreasonable. But that's also what people who have no source say.

Smith hasn't retired yet. He may. They say he's leaning that way. But until he does, of course they won't take that into account. It's still on the cap. As I said, with Butler's reduction, we don't know how much it is, so yes. (EDIT: Ah, I see I hadn't completed the post when you posted, my bad. Ah, but I see you're right on Mitch Morse. Thanks for correcting me there. However, having said, that, if you're counting future stuff like Lee Smith, we'll have to sign our draft class, Corey Bojorquez or a replacement, Matt Barkley or a replacement, Andre Roberts or a replacement, TJ Yeldon or a replacement, Levi Wallace And E.J. Gaines or replacement CBs, Dean Marlowe or a replacement, Feliciano or a replacement, Boettger or a replacement, McKenzie or a replacement, Taiwan Jones or a replacement and Isaiah McKenzie or a replacement. None of these guys count now against the cap, and a bunch of them will be on the team. Not to mention Matt Milano or a replacement and Daryl Williams or a replacement. Lots of dominoes still to fall. It'll be interesting.

Yeah, exactly, it'll depend on his play. Cutting him before the 2022 season would only save them $1.5M. Before the 2023 season about $3.7M.

It's impossible to give money back from bonus. They already borrowed it from future years. It's part of the cap. You can give back future money of course, but not past money.

No reason to think this. He could very easily be here for another year or two.

Spotrac says $15M in cap space.. OvertheCaps says $19M. OvertheCap has left a bunch of players, including Jefferson, off their dead cap reckoning. So it's somewhere around $15 to $17M. Both have accounted for all the moves made in the past couple of days with the exception of Butler's pay cut, because they haven't announced how much it is yet.

Makes absolutely zero sense, finanacially or otherwise. Now, if he comes back out of shape or injured or something, hey, anyone can go. But unless that happens, they'll be thrilled to get him back. This year showed clearly how badly they need a big guy in the middle eating blocks. Not that it wasn't obvious before. It was. But this made it even more clear. The contract's fine. The fuss over the contract is kind silly.

OTC has left a lot out of our dead cap. Compare their dead money numbers to Spotrac's. OTC has not accounted for Quinton Jefferson's $1.5M, Tyler Kroft's $800K, and a bunch more smaller ones. It totals around $2.3M. Nobody has taken Lee Smith off, because as of yet he's still contemplating. When he makes his mind up, the Bills will decide what they want to do with him and everyone will go from there. EDIT: DOH! Looks like Spotrac hasn't taken off Morse's cut yet either. Perhaps that's why they are diverging a bit.

Yeah, sounds good. And LB if we lose Milano. Maybe a TE. RB in the later rounds.

That's ridiculous. Singletary was fifth in the NFL last year at YPA. To say that he's a backup is showing far more about how little you get it than it is about our RBs. You've heard Beane say that they weren't the problem. He's infinitely more likely to be right than you are. Now, are they top 5 or 10 RBs? No, they sure haven't shown that. But most of the problem was the line and the fact that they didn't work on running enough this year. As for Ford, there's no such thing as "a bust to this point." A guy is a bust or he's not. If he hasn't done well yet but turns into a good player, he was never a bust, the dolts who said he was were not clever enough to know they were popping off far too early. It's indeed too early to know on Ford, though he doesn't look good enough at tackle. But in his first year at guard, having no real offseason to work on it, and then being switched side-to-side, which is an extremely tough switch, and having five games to work on all of that, he didn't have any real chance to show what he had. He still has a very good chance to be a player there. And yeah, you have said enough on Edmunds. You disagree with the Bills there too, and of the two of you, it ain't likely them that doesn't get it.

We have about $15M. Not $25M. They haven't included the Butler pay cut, though, as nobody knows yet how much it will be. So we'll have a bit more. He'll likely cut another guy or two Having said, that, we'll have to sign our draft class, Corey Bojorquez or a replacement, Matt Barkley or a replacement, Andre Roberts or a replacement, TJ Yeldon or a replacement, Levi Wallace And E.J. Gaines or replacement CBs, Dean Marlowe or a replacement, Feliciano or a replacement, Boettger or a replacement, McKenzie or a replacement, Taiwan Jones or a replacement and Isaiah McKenzie or a replacement. None of these guys count now against the cap, and a bunch of them will be on the team. Not to mention Matt Milano or a replacement and Daryl Williams or a replacement.

Not all rich fathers support their kids. And that's for good reason. There's a lot of evidence showing that supported kids of rich fathers are spoiled and unsuccessful shockingly often. Check Kevin O'Leary and his relationships with his kids if you want an example. And he is very very far from being alone. You can't assume that a guy doesn't want money because of his family, you just can't.

That is "the only factual information you have to go off"? Let me throw in some more: 2015 Age 27 16 games played 2016 Age 28 8 games played 2017 Age 29 10 games played 2018 Age 30 8 games played 2019 Age 31 4 games played 2020 Age 32 0 games played In the last five years, he's been healthy for 37.5% of his games. Throw out last year when he took the year off and in the four years when he was last trying to play, he was able to play in 46.8% of his games. And he's older now. Doctors can tell you what kind of shape a guy is in. They can't tell you with much accuracy whether he will get injured again next year even if he's healthy right now. You can bet the doctors told the Bears each of those years that there was a good solid chance he'd be healthy the whole season. I'd need a lot more than a discount to bring him in. I'd need a really carefully constructed contract that let us almost completely off the hook in case of injury. Presumably that would mean small salary and a bunch of incentives. Not sure how thrilled Long would be about that.

What a surprise that there is an NFL rule or situation that good organizations handle better than bad ones. You say it's the comp pick system that stacks the system against the bad teams. That's nonsense. It's how the bad teams react to it. To it and to every other thing that comes up. They react badly, because they're bad teams. That's not the fault of any rule.

David is probably better, though it's easier to play LB when your DL gets as much pressure in the pass game as Tampa Bay's does. But Milano is a premium off-ball linebacker, one of the better ones in the league. But David could also have gotten more if he'd gone to the open market. He gave his team a home-town discount. I think $13 to $14M could easily be seen as very reasonable for Milano. But not for Buffalo. We're tight on cap and need to consider other factors than how much Milano is really worth. The values you give are IMO a reasonable summary of what Buffalo's POV might reasonably be on what Milano is worth to us. But to the market, a guy with his skills could easily be worth more and turn out to be considered a very good signing. On the other hand, this is a bad year to be a free agent. Especially at a position where you're not directly affecting the QB the way a tackle, an Edge, a WR or a CB do. Maybe he doesn't this year get what he would have gotten last year or would get next year. If so, the Bills might have a good shot at getting him back.

And if you were Beane, we'd worry about your concerns about that. Edmunds played very well the last half of the year, after he got over his injury. And he did so without a genuine space eater in front of him clearing things up. And a space eater is a regular feature of a McDermott defense, something he needs for the LBs to function the way he likes. Some people here don't like the guy. That's clear. The Bills do, though, and that's clear too. You do want a guy as young as Edmunds to keep developing. Did you know he's only 22 years old, by the way? A guy his age is generally getting stronger and smarter with experience, and that's what we've seen so far. Now, he could maybe regress and be gone. That could happen. But there's no particular reason to think it will. He's a young guy, he's developing, and next year he's likely to have Lotulelei playing the space eater role in front of him. Maybe someone to spell Star as well.

I guess you could say he was rated between 5 and 15. But I don't think nearly anybody had him in the bottom part of your range there. He was generally considered between 7 and 12. And higher if you used him as an athletic center rather than in a power system. Which we aren't. He's well above average if you use him in a zone scheme. But yes, the concussion issues were real, we took a risk there. But yes, cutting him would indeed create another big hole. This made sense.

I'd disagree with your definitions of "plenty" and "a lot." Only 11 teams have more than $30M, and that's before teams sign back their own UFAs and RFAs, with the rookie draft class costing $6 - $7M per team. The Titans only have 21 guys on the roster who are getting more than $50K on their signing bonus amortized this year (a quick and very dirty way to look at guys who they have invested much in. To see how well this works, I compared the Bills, who have 30 guys in this category. (Some guys in this category are more obviously guys who are legit players with a chance. I threw in Lee Smith and Stefon Diggs on the Bills, though I doubt Lee will be here, personally, as I threw in Adoree Jackson on the Titans.) The guys not included, left out, are: Bryan Cox Jr, Jake Kumerow, Justin Zimmer, Jaquan Johnson, Darryl Johnson, Tommy Sweeney, Jordan Devey, Davis Webb, Ryan Bates, Duke Williams, Tyler Bass, Isaiah Hodgins, Dane Jackson, Reggie Gilliam, Tyrel Dodson, Trey Adams, Brandin Bryant, Tanner Gentry, Cam Lewis, Mike Love, Nate Becker, Josh Thomas, Christian Wade, Antonio Williams and Andre Smith. Looking at that list, there are maybe four or five guys who look likely to play significant roles on this team, though mostly as backups. Tyler Bass and Zimmer without much doubt, plus Jaquan Johnson and Dane Jackson, probably. Tommy Sweeney, maybe? And a few more could work their way up with a good offseason. But that group looks - to me at least - like a group mostly unlikely to play big parts in the plans of this team. It clearly does not work perfectly, but as a quick and dirty measure it's not awful, so I'll use it on other teams. Titans: 21 guys have signing bonus amortizations of over $50K, and I threw in Adoree Jackson even though he doesn't. The Steelers have 27, with me throwing in three obvious guy that are important even though they don't fit financially, Minkah Fitzpatrick, David DeCastro and TJ Watt. The Lions: 28 Cards: 28 Panthers: 24 Seahawks: 29 Ravens: 32 Browns: 31 ( I had to throw in five guys w/out bonuses who seem clearly in their plans, including Teller. If you are acquired by trade, you have no amortized bonus listed on your current team unless they re-worked your deal and gave you a signing bonus) Niners: 24 I picked these teams using the Spotrac list of cap available that H2o linked to above. I started just above the Bills and worked my way upward and stopped after #12, leaving the top 11 teams, the teams with more than $30M remaining, unexamined. So why did I bother doing this? Because it shows teams still have a lot of work to do before they even start thinking about bringing in impact FAs from outside. You have to pump up the number of all teams by 7 or so, as few teams cut more than one of their drafts for the current year. But there's a lot of guys to bring in yet for everyone. Those cap numbers are clearly higher than they will be fairly soon as teams bring back the FAs, and higher still than they'll be after signing their draftees. This time of year those numbers usually average somewhere in the 30s. This year $17. Now, some things will adjust numbers up also. The Bills just came to an agreement with Morse that raised the cap by $2M. Other teams will do the same. There will also be cuts. But overall there aren't, by my definition at least, "plenty" of teams with what I would call "a lot" of money.

They appear not to want to tag him. So not awful, but not good. Depends on his market. Poz couldn't defend the pass at anything close to Milano's level. I liked him a lot but Milano is better.

So someone on social media expressed criticism? Holy cow! Call the newspapers! Oh, wait, someone already did? This is huge.

Every time someone with a source or inside knowledge has talked they've been saying $180 - $185 and more specifically $181 - $182 roughly. This is where it's always been heading. Could be a little bit more or a little bit less, but it sure seems like this is the area.