No progress in Derrick Dockery Negotiations....

[Schneed10]

Originally Posted by skinsfan69

So what your saying is we should possibly overpay for him for the sake of the locker room? I would agree with you if we were 10 or 20 million under the cap. But is this team in a position to possibly overpay for someone when so many big bonuses have already been paid out? I think at this point we are three milllion over the cap. It looks like we are going to have to do a lot of slashing and restructuring. I hope he stays but at the right price.

Three million over is a high estimate. I think the actual number is about $2 or $3 million under.

Secondly there is lots of room for restructuring. Players are due high base salaries this season which are easily renogotiated into lump sum signing bonuses. Win for the team (frees up space), win for the player (gets paid what the contract states, except gets it in one lump sum instead of spread out in game checks).

Even if we signed Dockery to a 6 year, $35 million deal, with a $10 million signing bonus, they would structure it so that he'd only cost us $2.5 million against the cap in 2007.

PS I'm not saying we should pay him that, but this is just to illustrate that whatever we sign him for, his 2007 cap hit should not be a problem for us.

[Bill B]

Originally Posted by Schneed10

Three million over is a high estimate. I think the actual number is about $2 or $3 million under.

Secondly there is lots of room for restructuring. Players are due high base salaries this season which are easily renogotiated into lump sum signing bonuses. Win for the team (frees up space), win for the player (gets paid what the contract states, except gets it in one lump sum instead of spread out in game checks).

Even if we signed Dockery to a 6 year, $35 million deal, with a $10 million signing bonus, they would structure it so that he'd only cost us $2.5 million against the cap in 2007.

Schneed - I know you say win for the team but what about the dead cap hit in the future - wouldn't that be considered a "loss for the team" at some point in the future? At some point won't the team have to pay the piper for all the dead cap space on salary renegotiations - if I am correct isn't this what happened to the Titans and they had to basically release a bunch of good players like Samare Rolle and they had a dismal season?

I guess you can say that the cap will keep going up so we can keep renegotiating and Synder has the ATM machine cranking with bonuses to keep doing this, but if you were the GM wouldn't it be an issue to contain/minimize dead cap space as far as long range planning goes to avoid what happened to the Titans? Especially since the NFL has shortened the amount of years you can spread the bonus over (I believe it was 6 or 7 and it is now 4).