As the season came to a close, we worked out a couple of things with player contracts, to tie up the remaining meaningful loose ends heading into next season. As loyal readers already know, we have pretty aggressively tried to work out long term deals with many of our core players, and I have tried to keep many of our quality guys from even sniffing the free agent market.
With a couple weeks left in the season, we had a few guys still unsigned for next year, and I didn’t have a clear long term strategy. The biggest outlier was TE
, a pre-season breakout player this year who had an excellent season for us, is an affinity guy, and really would be great to keep around. I’ve never been terribly keen on overpaying tight ends, but he seems like the complete package, and in the penultimate stage, we offered him a new five year deal, which he accepted. So, Cooper is locked up long term, which is excellent. He posted 888 yards and 8 TDs this season, and still got shut out for all-pro honors, which is pretty absurd to me. But his outstanding postseason, especially coming up huge in the Portland game (when our wideouts were letting us down) made this an easier decision – he’s got to stay.
We were able to clear work things out with Cooper only one way – by making a cut. The obvious candidate, a heartless as it is, was LT
. Tilton had been with us for a good solid nine years, but is still looking for big money, and just has never lived up to his pretty lofty scouted skills. He’s got great red bars, but he’s got a career KRB% of only 31.3% - not exactly top shelf stuff. He played this season under the franchise tag, but next year there’s simply no way we can pay him $8m or whatever he wants, so this wasn’t a ridiculous cut. It’s cheap that it works out this way under the cap (in FOF 2004) but we let him go, and free up space to sign a new deal with Cooper and others.
. McKenzie has been stellar for us as a great free agent signing (he was a mid-career breakout, and we struck quickly to lock him up to a good deal right after the “new” guy was revealed. He’s in his 9th season, so the decline could come any time, but we are so pathetic at LB, we really couldn’t afford to let him taste free agency, as we have no Plan B at all. Burns mostly rode the bench this season, but comes into next year as our presumed RT starter, and he ought to be just fine. He has actually posted very solid stats when we have played him (intermittently) and our hope is that next year, reflecting on a season with a relative paucity of stats, he will settle for a salary reduction and help us clear some space.
But that leaves us heading into next year with nobody we’ll need to franchise tag. Here’s the salary situation at the end of the 2013 season, FYI:
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Front Office Football 2004
Chesapeake Chili Dogs Roster, Contract View
Player # Pos Start OnTm EndCnt Exp Cap Cost Save if Rls
Sedor, Brent 16 QB QB 2009 2016 5 $6,910,000 $1,730,000
Lazaro, Jamel 93 RDE RDE 2012 2014 16 $5,500,000 $3,230,000
Pearson, Burt 8 FL FL 2011 2018 3 $5,280,000 $1,230,000
Kolodzik, Horace 73 LT LT 2009 2017 9 $4,520,000 $1,230,000
Kuehler, Lewis 27 RCB RCB 2011 2018 8 $4,410,000 $1,230,000
Ewart, Daryl 92 SLB SLB 2011 2017 8 $4,300,000 $2,230,000
McKenzie, Doug 59 MLB MLB 2009 2015 9 $4,240,000 $830,000
Galvan, John 58 SLB 2003 2014 12 $4,200,000 $1,730,000
Lents, Bryan 96 RDT RDT 2010 2017 4 $3,990,000 $1,230,000
Cooper, Robert 13 TE TE 2009 2017 5 $3,230,000 $1,730,000
Turnbull, Winston 54 C C 2008 2015 6 $3,080,000 $1,230,000
Padgett, Herman 31 LCB LCB 2008 2017 6 $2,600,000 $530,000
Copley, Craps 45 RB 2010 2014 12 $2,340,000 $1,350,000
Torpey, Robert 80 SE 2011 2014 12 $2,110,000 $750,000
McCartney, Jeff 21 FS FS 2008 2016 6 $2,050,000 $1,230,000
Burns, Jerry 75 RT RT 2009 2016 5 $1,910,000 $520,000
Boyd, Lenny 61 LT 2010 2014 8 $1,880,000 $1,220,000
Schmit, Gus 66 LG LG 2008 2015 6 $1,650,000 $980,000
##Ross, Harry 2 QB 2013 2015 10 $1,600,000 $1,330,000
##Schwantz, Doug 29 SS 2009 2015 5 $1,600,000 $730,000
Wunderlich, Bill 47 FB RB 2009 2015 12 $1,560,000 $640,000
Ellis, George 18 SE SE 2010 2016 4 $1,480,000 $730,000
Lombardo, Albert 40 RB 2013 2015 10 $1,300,000 $730,000
Fields, Kent 86 FL 2012 2014 2 $1,050,000 $350,000
White, Johnny 99 RDE LDT 2013 2015 8 $1,000,000 $730,000
Watkins, Steven 95 MLB 2003 2015 15 $990,000 $700,000
Armagost, Dwight 70 LDT 2010 2015 4 $980,000 $530,000
##Houtz, John 53 C 2012 2015 15 $930,000 $640,000
##Upshaw, Jon 41 SS 2010 2015 11 $910,000 $640,000
**Brandon, Marvin 60 RG 2008 2014 6 $900,000 $530,000
Gibbons, Preston 97 MLB WLB 2010 2014 9 $850,000 $520,000
Tellez, Leland 34 RCB 2010 2015 5 $840,000 $370,000
Dennis, D.J. 57 SILB 2004 2013 10 $820,000 $520,000
Emerson, Charles 42 FB FB 2005 2015 9 $810,000 $520,000
Hastings, Tyrone 87 FL 2011 2015 10 $810,000 $520,000
##Abdul-Malik, Oscar 82 FL 2012 2015 9 $790,000 $520,000
Kuykendall, Travis 56 SLB 2006 2015 8 $790,000 $520,000
Lambeau, Wendell 55 C 2009 2014 6 $760,000 $480,000
Gerhardt, Alex 7 QB 2011 2013 3 $760,000 $350,000
Everhart, David 19 K 2008 2015 6 $740,000 $470,000
Wickham, Drew 63 LG 2013 2013 1 $700,000 $430,000
Clayton, Skip 94 LDE 2012 2014 2 $700,000 $210,000
Webb, Dixon 32 LCB 2009 2014 5 $670,000 $370,000
Vesser, Brett 23 SS SS 2009 2014 5 $660,000 $370,000
Hotle, Brett 43 SS 2013 2013 7 $640,000 $370,000
Johnstone, Walt 4 QB 2013 2015 1 $590,000 $50,000
##Cook, Sam 38 RB 2012 2014 2 $580,000 $210,000
Meadows, Kerry 90 LDE LDE 2012 2014 2 $580,000 $210,000
Daniels, C.J. 28 LCB 2012 2014 2 $580,000 $210,000
Alfonso, Conrad 9 P 2010 2016 4 $560,000 $280,000
Csonka, Shane 74 RG RG 2012 2014 2 $490,000 $170,000
Leff, Harvey 83 TE 2012 2013 2 $370,000 $100,000
McDowell, Lorenzo 52 MLB 2013 2015 1 $350,000 $50,000
##Small, Harry 20 RB 2013 2013 1 $270,000 $0
Edwards, Phil 14 QB 2013 ---- 1 $0 $0
Pint, Rex 15 RDE 2013 ---- 1 $0 $0
$$ - player is in starting lineup, ## - player is inactive.
Players Under Contract: 54
Inactive: 7
On Active Roster: 46
Salary Cap: $96,800,000
Cap Room: $1,350,000
Maximum for New Player: $1,700,000
Cap Room Lost (to old contracts): $1,510,000
Cap Room Lost Next Year (to old contracts): $1,040,000
Cap Room Required Next Year: $114,210,000
A few quick notes – DE Lazaro counts as something like $21m in next year’s salary count, as his base salary goes through the roof after this year (we were only counting on him for these two years when we signed him). He will not be with us at anything like that price – he will either (in descending order of likelihood) retire this offseason, be released or traded, or be renegotiated way way down. Most likely, he will be on our books for $2m of dead space next season – but that switch alone puts us something like $6 million below the salary cap next season.
If we indeed have $6m or so in space, and have only a handful of fairly affordable restricted free agents to worry about from our own roster – there’s at least some potential that we will be in pretty good shape for next season, cap-wise. I doubt we will be among the cap space leaders (we never are, the league still has teams that come in $30m or more below the cap every year) but we ought to be in position to make a run at one or two role player types, which is probably the best thing for us to be doing anyway.
So – cap situation for 2014 looks okay. We’ll lose Lazaro, and whomever else drops from retirement (RB Copley? FB Wunderlich? LB/DE Galvan?) but we ought to be in position to fill the holes we have with a few veterans and our nearly-full complement of draft picks.