FA2/Camp
QB Buddy Weber is holding out.
He's back to wanting the $13-15m/yr deal he wanted before. Seems like a perfectly reasonable number for a starting QB. It's just not what we do here.
LB Seth Thomas is holding out as well. He was one of the bigger changes in a defense that went from dominant to pedestrian. He went from dominant to pedestrian. Now he's holding out. It's a gut punch because we need him pretty badly with Blackledge leaving. (I still haven't cut/dump traded him but there's no way to make it work. He wants MORE than the tag money.)
Anyway, those are two shitty holdouts. I'm not sure the Dom Ellis era is quite ready. He's hitting the roster at 9/33. (Perfect for us?)
We lost a lot of sneaky good talent this year. DT Isaiah Jacobs was an understated guy with a lot of time on the field. RB Glen Scott was good depth. S Alec Sexton got a little squeezed out of playing time but signed a big FA deal to leave. We're going to be suddenly very thin on the D-Line. I think having Blackledge's body on the roster let my eyes skim past that a little. Thomas is basically a DL for us so that holdout stretches us further. We're obviously continuing to pull good players out of our asses but cycling in undeveloped/no cohesion guys is a bad business to be in.
Guess we waited too long to trade Blackledge too. No General Manager expressed interest in the player. Sweet.
So... we do some truly destructive and weird shit. We're keeping Blackledge. We capped out LB Henry, SS Ted Matthews (who we officially converted to a CB just now), and RT Sean Flowers. None of those moves individually looks terrible, but cumulatively, they add up to some meaningful future year increases. The cherry on top is we're too far over this year still to get anything done with Blackledge other than a massive bonus 3 year deal where his hit balloons to $28m in the two years after this one. We're going to have problems next year and we're already set to lose some absolute favorites like DT Jace Wolcott and WR Donnie Farmer.
I don't know exactly what we're doing. There IS a Steam badge Bruce Smith challenge for trying to get one of your guys 171 sacks in a career. Blackledge is at 100...
It feels like we were gonna turn over in a major way this coming offseason anyway. We're lucky as hell that the last few drafts have turned us toward a OL and WR talent base, and a little bit away from a highly paid DL talent base. The most workable way to do this probably still relies on establishing and spending on the OL to avoid the low dev churn there. Having enough WRs to compete or finding some way to be successful running the ball... which I think we just didn't have the OL for early. If we could get the OL to a place where you could still use the occasional 1st/2nd on the defensive side I think you can stay talented enough there too. The secondary gets tough. I'm not sure you can have truly GOOD CBs picking late, and I really don't think you can by trying to farm mid-rounders. I might start moving toward just getting big interception bars onto the field there to see if we can reverse a career-long trend of bad takeaway numbers.
A lot to unpack there. Plus, holdouts!