Why Jauron may be safe regardless

[BillsVet]

Huizenga didn't plan on Brady missing the season, Favre getting injured, or Pennington falling into their laps. And this season is proving to be a major disappointment for them, with Parcells probably quitting at the end.

 

Analyze what Huizenga did in the context of moving away from a bad regime (Cam Cameron HC, Randy Mueller GM) and look at is strictly as a business decision for future success. Huizenga decided to invest 27M into hiring Parcells, firing his whole staff, and then paying for the people Parcells advocated for.

 

Miami, as I admitted, caught a lot of bounces. But paying 27M to turn around a franchise is what he felt necessary, and he's a wealthy man. RW won't even spend 8M to fire a horrible HC and then the requisite amount for new front office talent.

[Bill from NYC]

Ralph can fire Jauron and promote April, who he is already paying. This would cost very little. He could also hire Levy, thinking that he will "right the ship" and of course sell tickets.

Either way, we would be the same laughing stock with either of them than we are now. Maybe April might gain a little control of the team. At Marv's age, just getting to know who is on the team might prove to be difficult, and I am NOT being sarcastic. I don't think that a man as old as Marv should be standing outside for hours in the elements, let alone coaching an NFL Team.

[Doc]

Analyze what Huizenga did in the context of moving away from a bad regime (Cam Cameron HC, Randy Mueller GM) and look at is strictly as a business decision for future success. Huizenga decided to invest 27M into hiring Parcells, firing his whole staff, and then paying for the people Parcells advocated for.

 

Miami, as I admitted, caught a lot of bounces. But paying 27M to turn around a franchise is what he felt necessary, and he's a wealthy man. RW won't even spend 8M to fire a horrible HC and then the requisite amount for new front office talent.

As a business decision, Huizenga's $27M might have been a good investement. On the other hand, it might have been a wash, or it might have been $27M wasted. No one knows if Ross was going to buy the team anyway and/or what effect hiring Parcells had on purchasing/price.

 

And last year, a LOT of bounces went their way. But if there's no long-term sustained success, basically the only one who profited, possibly, is Huizenga. And he made a lot of money anyway, from what he paid for the team to what he sold it for.

[Mr. WEO]

Ralph can fire Jauron and promote April, who he is already paying. This would cost very little. He could also hire Levy, thinking that he will "right the ship" and of course sell tickets.

Either way, we would be the same laughing stock with either of them than we are now. Maybe April might gain a little control of the team. At Marv's age, just getting to know who is on the team might prove to be difficult, and I am NOT being sarcastic. I don't think that a man as old as Marv should be standing outside for hours in the elements, let alone coaching an NFL Team.

Who is going to want to see a team staffed by Marv Levy and Bobby April??

[Sisyphean Bills]

The Bills have never been close to the salary cap floor.

Not sure what your point is. The salary floor is real. Teams are required to spend money on players. They are not required to spend money wisely on players. Frittering away $18.5M on a so-so guard burns cap money. Whatever they blow in guaranteed money is cap money. Wahoo! They spent a small fortune on Dockery and Walker and that did indeed help them get between the salary cap and floor this year with plenty of dead money.

And it's not like they paid Dockery based on it. He got $18.5M, which ideally was supposed to be for at least 4 seasons. He didn't last more than 2. That $4.5M saved goes into Ralph's pocket and can be used for a new HC. So it's the same deal.

Like I already said, they gave him a Steve Hutchinson deal. Hutchinson got the same money the year before. The problem is Hutch is a great player and Dock is a so-so player.

 

Yes, every dollar squeezed out by driving player payroll down helps the bottom line that year. That doesn't mean Ralph doesn't have to spend any money. Nor does it mean he has to fork over good money after bad. It doesn't mean that eating a coaching staff's payroll and hiring a new one is cheap. Nor does it mean that it isn't Ralph decision as to what sort of ROI he's getting for the outlay he's already placed on the table for the current coaches.

 

More to the point, Ralph has not been cheap on paying the players since the late-80s. He threw pretty good money at T.O. this year. He has always been tight when it comes to paying coaches however and has made exactly 1 marquee coaching hire in 50 years. The Bills are near the bottom overall in coaching salaries. There is no floor to coaching salaries and no cap and apparently Ralph has never had much/any motivation to pay for a big-name coach.

 

Edit: Here are some number on the cap. The salary cap is ~$127M. The floor is ~86%. That's a $18M bracket. The Bills were estimated about $6-7M under the cap at one point this past offseason. I don't know if that included dead money or not. Still, if you just removed $18.5M from the equation, the Bills would fall short of the salary floor. (Yes, I know you can't just remove money like that. This is just bogo-numbers for illustration.)

[barbwire]

Ralph can fire Jauron and promote April, who he is already paying. This would cost very little. He could also hire Levy, thinking that he will "right the ship" and of course sell tickets.

Either way, we would be the same laughing stock with either of them than we are now. Maybe April might gain a little control of the team. At Marv's age, just getting to know who is on the team might prove to be difficult, and I am NOT being sarcastic. I don't think that a man as old as Marv should be standing outside for hours in the elements, let alone coaching an NFL Team.

 

 

Marv has more FIRE and EMOTION in his little finger than DEAD HEAD DICK

[The Senator]

Ralph can fire Jauron and promote April, who he is already paying. This would cost very little. He could also hire Levy, thinking that he will "right the ship" and of course sell tickets.

Either way, we would be the same laughing stock with either of them than we are now. Maybe April might gain a little control of the team. At Marv's age, just getting to know who is on the team might prove to be difficult, and I am NOT being sarcastic. I don't think that a man as old as Marv should be standing outside for hours in the elements, let alone coaching an NFL Team.

Nobody says muther-!@#$-er quite like Marv.

[DrFishfinder]

The truth of the matter is that no one on this message board, unless they happen to be part of the inner circle at OBD, knows what Ralph is thinking. All we can do is look at past history and postulate from now until Ralph DOES make a decision, so have at it.

[Doc]

Not sure what your point is. The salary floor is real. Teams are required to spend money on players. They are not required to spend money wisely on players. Frittering away $18.5M on a so-so guard burns cap money. Whatever they blow in guaranteed money is cap money. Wahoo! They spent a small fortune on Dockery and Walker and that did indeed help them get between the salary cap and floor this year with plenty of dead money.

 

Like I already said, they gave him a Steve Hutchinson deal. Hutchinson got the same money the year before. The problem is Hutch is a great player and Dock is a so-so player.

 

Yes, every dollar squeezed out by driving player payroll down helps the bottom line that year. That doesn't mean Ralph doesn't have to spend any money. Nor does it mean he has to fork over good money after bad. It doesn't mean that eating a coaching staff's payroll and hiring a new one is cheap. Nor does it mean that it isn't Ralph decision as to what sort of ROI he's getting for the outlay he's already placed on the table for the current coaches.

 

More to the point, Ralph has not been cheap on paying the players since the late-80s. He threw pretty good money at T.O. this year. He has always been tight when it comes to paying coaches however and has made exactly 1 marquee coaching hire in 50 years. The Bills are near the bottom overall in coaching salaries. There is no floor to coaching salaries and no cap and apparently Ralph has never had much/any motivation to pay for a big-name coach.

I agree with you about Ralph and coaches. I don't know what his hangup is with hiring a name one, although it's possible that name coaches don't consider Buffalo a prime gig, just like a lot of players cross Buffalo off of their list of places to play.

 

However Dockery was given his contract not because the team needed to get above the salary cap floor, but because they thought he was a good player and needed to overpay to get him. They gave him a 7-year contract with $18.5M guaranteed, expecting that he'd play well enough to at least stick around for at least 4 years. As it turned out, he played worse than so-so and was cut after just 2 years, meaning that Ralph wasted that $18.5M. The salary cap had nothing to do with it, outside of Ralph not wanting to waste more of his money on Dockery. And I doubt anyone would have gone as crazy had the Bills kept him, than what they'll do if he keeps Jauron another season.

[iinii]

The roster bonus was, I think, a couple hundred thou - chump change, really - like throwing a deck chair off the Queen Mary when compared to the $$$multi-million$$$ signing bonus that the Bills still have to pay Dockery regardless of whether he plays for us or not ($18 million signing bonus, the third largest in NFL history at his position).

 

So it definitely wasn't about a few hundred thousand dollars roster bonus - it just became apparent that he couldn't keep up in the no-huddle, his overall play seemed to be slipping, and his attitude was worsening. Much like FatBoy Peters, once Dockery got the big bucks - the $18 million - he just didn't seem to give a !@#$ about excelling at football any more.

 

If you don't think so, then why has no one else signed the guy?

If you are talking about Dockery, he went home to his mothers

[DCbillsfan]

People on this board are so clueless sometimes. There is one rule of economics, finance and business that you guys think that Ralph Wilson, a self-made multi-millionaire, is forgetting. Contractual agreements with Dick Jauron all but make the $9 Million owed in salary completely sunk. Sunk costs are never ever considered in future business decisions, whether it is millions of dollars paid for the coach, or the $200 K sunk into stadium maintenance this past summer.

 

Saying that "Ralph won't fire Jauron because he doesn't want to eat the $8 million" is so ignorant that it makes my head spin. Even if Wilson is in fact senile to the fact that he forgot this fundamental rule of thumb (which I doubt), he is still surrounded by a handful of financial advisors who are paid a healthy salary to remind him of elementary finance decisions.

 

I'll agree with some that Jauron might be kept longer than we may like, but I'll put money ($9 million?) down that it's not because he's afraid to eat the sunk cost. The decision to keep him until the seasons end could be for a larger demand-rebound in the off-season if we wait to fire him in the off season, when our record is 0-0, instead of bringing in an unkown after the bye week when we're 2-6.

 

Per Google a sunk cost is

 

•Any expenditure that has already taken place and can not be undone. Decisions should not be made based on sunk costs.

 

In theory you are right but in reality where have been the past 50 years? Ralph is cheap, cheap, cheap. If Ralph isn't cheap then please explain why Jauron is the HC now. He should have been fired at the end of last season but no. Why is that? Did you really buy into the continuity thing? He didn't fire him because he just gave him a sunk cost 3 year contract for $9 million and the cheap bastard doesn't want to eat it. Simple yet true.

[Sisyphean Bills]

I agree with you about Ralph and coaches. I don't know what his hangup is with hiring a name one, although it's possible that name coaches don't consider Buffalo a prime gig, just like a lot of players cross Buffalo off of their list of places to play.

 

However Dockery was given his contract not because the team needed to get above the salary cap floor, but because they thought he was a good player and needed to overpay to get him. They gave him a 7-year contract with $18.5M guaranteed, expecting that he'd play well enough to at least stick around for at least 4 years. As it turned out, he played worse than so-so and was cut after just 2 years, meaning that Ralph wasted that $18.5M. The salary cap had nothing to do with it, outside of Ralph not wanting to waste more of his money on Dockery. And I doubt anyone would have gone as crazy had the Bills kept him, than what they'll do if he keeps Jauron another season.

A-ha. I think I see what I maybe didn't communicate well. I believe Ralph is "inspired" to pay players (whether the player is good or bad is irrelevant) because of the salary cap. The salary cap really helps set market values for players and the bean counters in the organization, Littmann and Overdorf, have to acknowledge these values. They really have no choice because of the way the NFL operates these days. More precisely: it could be argued that it looks like the Bills are turning back the clock to operate much like they did in the pre-Bill Polian era in some respects. At one time, the Bills were sold around OJ Simpson and were pretty much a laughingstock and not competitive at all. Sound familiar? The Bills will drop some coin here and there on T.O.-like free agents (it does help their marketing and meeting the salary floor to blow big chunks of cap space on rent-a-mercenary types), they'll draft a Tim Tebow-type for the "Wow!" factor, and continue to milk the fans.

 

In short: It's Ralph's show.

[Doc]

A-ha. I think I see what I maybe didn't communicate well. I believe Ralph is "inspired" to pay players (whether the player is good or bad is irrelevant) because of the salary cap. The salary cap really helps set market values for players and the bean counters in the organization, Littmann and Overdorf, have to acknowledge these values. They really have no choice because of the way the NFL operates these days. More precisely: it could be argued that it looks like the Bills are turning back the clock to operate much like they did in the pre-Bill Polian era in some respects. At one time, the Bills were sold around OJ Simpson and were pretty much a laughingstock and not competitive at all. Sound familiar? The Bills will drop some coin here and there on T.O.-like free agents (it does help their marketing and meeting the salary floor to blow big chunks of cap space on rent-a-mercenary types), they'll draft a Tim Tebow for the "Wow!" factor, and continue to milk the fans.

No, I understood what you were trying to get at, but we'll just have to agree to disagree. I believe Ralph will fire Jauron at the end of the year. Whether he hires a big name coach, I don't know.

[Sisyphean Bills]

No, I understood what you were trying to get at, but we'll just have to agree to disagree. I believe Ralph will fire Jauron at the end of the year. Whether he hires a big name coach, I don't know.

It's Ralph's show and it's re-runs.

 

I'd like to say that I disagree as well, but given the cluster !@#$ that has gone on the last few years, I don't really see a whole lot to hang your hat on for that. This team is not getting better.

 

It is what it is.

 

(With a nod towards Adam) Even if they do fire Dick Jauron, that is not enough. The front office has screwed this thing up royally. Unless they gut the whole thing and are prepared to start over from scratch, what does dumping the coach really accomplish in football terms? Is Ralph Wilson, at 91, really prepared to start over? Yet again? I think the answer is plain from his lack of planning and decisiveness the past 4 years.

[Bill from NYC]

Who is going to want to see a team staffed by Marv Levy and Bobby April??

 

I couldn't agree more, but Ralph comes back to who he knows. Notce than AVP is running the offense, and remember, it WAS Marv who hired Jauron. Marv had no business being GM, so the situation just snowballed.

 

It is too bad that TD screwed up so badly when he was here, because that is exactly the situation we need, a powerful GM calling the shots. That and of course a winning head coach like Marty Schottenheimer.

[BillsVet]

The truth of the matter is that no one on this message board, unless they happen to be part of the inner circle at OBD, knows what Ralph is thinking. All we can do is look at past history and postulate from now until Ralph DOES make a decision, so have at it.

 

No one does know what RW is thinking, and I'm not sure if RW does. He looked fine at the HOF enshrinement, but 90 year old men do not make long term plans.

 

Ever since 2006, the Bills have not gone outside the organization for anything, aside from having to hire Bob Sanders for the DL. And that was something they didn't want to do.

 

I just don't see RW giving a long term contract out at 91 for a coach. It's one thing to sign TO for 1 year at 6.5M-he's a players and as Sisyphean pointed out, they need to pay the cap floor.. But it's going to cost 5M+ for Shanahan, Cowher, Gruden, or Holmgren and they'll be getting long term deals. Besides, RW isn't about to cede personnel control to anyone but people he knows. Most of all, this team needs to be ready to be sold, and having a contract of 5M+ for a few years is another (albeit smaller) impediment. Belichick didn't go to Baltimore when the Browns moved.

[spartacus]

The greater issue, outside of pure business decisions, is that RW does not like paying people not to work. I'm sure you'll recall the Wade Phillips event, when Wilson claimed WP quit on and was not fired. The former would remove RW's obligation to pay WP.

 

This is a stubborn man, Mr. Wilson. He's accustomed, over a lifetime of business and sports ventures, to getting his way. He's not fired a coach mid-season since the eigthties when HC's earned a fraction of what they used to.

 

and you may have stumbled on why the Bills have no OL in 2009.

 

The Ralph plan seems to be to make the team so bad that Dick would prefer to quit than put up with this disaster of a team and the fan backlash.

[Sisyphean Bills]

and you may have stumbled on why the Bills have no OL in 2009.

And I had heard it was because "fat guys don't sell."

 

Of course, my friends that are Giants fans laugh their asses off about that one.