[MIJB#19]

General Manager Notes: 2106, the off-season has begun

A new off-season, new opportunities to leave behind the mistakes from the past and work on improvement of the team.

We start the off-season down three players. WR Ed Schulz, C Elijah Cyr and S Pete Weaver retired from football. Cyr played 2 seasons with us, playing in all 32 regular season and 2 playoffs games in 2104. A rock solid interior lineman, it's too bad he felt that it was time to pursue the life after football, I hoped to see him anchor our line for a little bit longer. Weaver played three seasons with us, also having joined as a veteran free agent signing. Weaver was our fifth or sixth defensive back, never missing a game.

Ed Schulz received Legend of the Game honors as he bowed out. Our 2093 first round pick was taken to become the successor of Theodore Bondy, but after a five good seasons, it turned out he would never reach his potential. Although settling for being "good" rather than "very good", he made a smooth transition from underperforming WR1 to a decent WR3 behind the most talented receiver duo in Merchantmen history of Calvin Maxwell and Vinny Buysse. His resume includes 3 seasons of over 1,000 yards receiving, peaking in 2097 with 1,399 yards and 11 touchdowns. Although coming short of the 10K mark, he steps away ranking 8th in yardage and 9th in receptions all-time amongst Merchantmen players. The highlight of his career came as late as his 12th season as the Merchantmen ended the longest playoffs drought with the 2104 European Division title and a victory in the wild card round. Schulz missed the last games of the 2105 season due to injury, meaning he didn't have the opportunity to help avoid the late season collaps.

The replacement for Schulz has already been acquired as we spent the 1.27 draft pick on WR Alfredo Samuels. The pick came from a trade down from the 1.13 slot, the spot we already contemplated picking Samuels. We picked up the 2107 2nd round pick of the North Plainfield Plague in the process. In the second round we picked G Andres Uwaezuoke, a direct result of the retirement of Cyr. This paves the way for Lincoln Stonge to return to playing center, while Uwaezuoke gets a change to play at his natural positon.

Other activity in the off-season included a truck load of renegotiations to get under the cap. This included contract extensions to key players TE Garrett Alcala and DT Gabriel Morris. We also re-signed LT Harold Gruenwalder as an unrestricted free agent and brought back restricted free agents WR Teddy Butler and WR Herman Jeffries. My first offers to QB Evan Drake and LB Gus Coleman got turned down, which is probably the start of a long series of negotiation meetings, hopefully absent of either of them announcing a hold out.

Last but not least, presumably, we go into the 2106 season with the same staff members as last season. That means another season of Clarence Byrd as our smashmouth offensive coordinator, despite that fellow general managers in the IHOF have advised me to replace him. It will be Byrd's 10th season with us. We also hung onto Bradley Knight as our head coach, despite that we declined from 11-5 to 7-9 in his first season. Shockingly the team he left, the North Plainfield Plague, improved from 6-10 to 12-4 under the command of debuting head coach Todd Clinton. Yes, the same Clinton that played defensive end for us from 2076 through 2079.