[MIJB#19]

General Manager Notes: Unpredictable pre-season
The 2105 regular season is 2 exhibition games away...

Two pre-season games under our belt and after them, our staff members reported some sudden changes in several players' ability to play football.

In that pre-season action, we rolled up the Arizona Miners in Oranje Haven. The final score of 22-7 barely represented how we outgained them 438 to 193 total yards. We followed up by outgaining the Oakland Black Panthers 487 to 356 total yards, but after an unlikely go ahead touchdown (77-yard catch and run from Vinny Buysse), there 3 seconds left, just enough to see our hosts return a kickoff return for a 34-31 victory.

After returning home in Maassluis after that second game, 15 players were reported as having lost quite some of their speed, strength or whatever it is that used to make them good at their position. Of those 15, the ones that don't bother me much are QB Evan Drake, RB George Shackleford, WR Vinny Buysse, C Lincoln Stonge, DE Robbie Dobreski, DE Andres Harmon and LB Cody Ross. Most of them won't see a huge effect (or so I hope), while Ross was hired just for his special teams skills and Shackleford wasn't likely to make the 53-men roster anyway.

For 8 guys, I was mildly disappointed. QB Malachi Manning shouldn't matter much at all, since we only used his kick holding skills, but now there's just no reason to keep him over off-season signing QB Drake Bishop. For TE Darnell McKie it was disappointing, but I suspect he'll still be an awesome third down receiver. In our battle for the WR4 and WR5 spots, WR Rick Emerson and WR Calvin Hancock were reported as on the decline and are now in danger of dropping off our 46-men active list for the 2105 season. But, we have a couple of rookies that might step in.

The real drama happened with G Corwin Driver and G Kenyon Helm. Both had a big enough drop to make it pointless to see them as starting material. This paves the way for C Lincoln Stonge to lock up the 5th starting spot. Unless there another option... But I'll come back to that later.

For DE Spencer Crawford the decline will likely result in his departure after 6 loyal seasons as a deep down the depth chart backup and primarily a special teamer. LB Mo Fausel will still make the team, but all the improvement from last off-season vanished as if it was never there. His agent made great use of it, we locked Fausel up as a restricted free agent.

Next stop will be some cap management to find enough room to extend the contracts of most of the 18 players that have their contract run out after the season. We're currently at $32M under the cap, but these players together want roughly $84M added to their cap figures for this season. So, 3 things to do: Make our cuts down to 53 to figure out what cap room we'll have available. Negotiate with several longer term signed players that will push some cap cost to next season, but stay within a manageable figure next season. And then there will be some guys where we will have to be creative with our offers.

Once the key players are locked up, we'll look at the remaining cap space and look at two more things. Will we lock up the backups as well or will we look at the free agent market or the recycle bin of soon to be released players to look for a better option at offensive guard?