Kickoff
Jun 19, 2008 2008 Season, Colvin, Money Money Money, Secondary issues are primary, Teams that aren't the Texans, Tremendous Busts
Maximum Reward, Minimum Kwan. Via BRB, who still collectively possess the will to read John McClain, we get the terms of Rosevelt Colvin’s contract. On a scale of 1-10, this deal ranks a solid 9. Worst case scenario, Colvin makes the team, gets injured and placed on IR in week 1, and we cut him as a June 1 casualty next year–he only counts $250,000 against the cap in 2009 and 2010. Best case scenario, we have a bona fide third-down edge rusher and sometime LB who still isn’t costing us much of anything.
Hello, Vegas? Gimme $500 on black. D’oh…ok, I’ll send you a check. Thinking of betting on the Texans week 1 game against the Stillers? Here’s some interesting background regarding both teams against the spread and straight up last year. If you read this and win, I get 5%.
What say you? Not long ago, we signed the other Jimmy Williams and I lamented the fact that I’d hope it was the Jimmy Williams we’d all heard off. Well, Atlanta went at cut that J-Dub yesterday, raising an interesting question: Do you take a flier on a guy who hardly got to play because his secondary coach hated him, but who is really fast and was thought to be the best DB in the draft only a few years ago? Stated different, do you take a guy whose talent should make him light-years better than CC Brown and see what Ray Rhodes can do with him?
Battlelicious
Feb 23, 2008 2007 Season, 2008 Season, Fuck the Cowboys, Houston Chronicle, Money Money Money, Rosie Rosenfels, Roster, The Schaub Experiment
[T]he team won’t hesitate to start [Sage] Rosenfels if he outplays [Matt] Schaub this season.
“That to me always plays itself out on the football field,” Smith said. “I don’t think you can let finances, ego, I don’t think you can let anything stand in the way of playing the best football player because that is going to win you football games on Sunday.”
I suppose, on its face, that statement is far more enlightened than what you get out of most general managers. Lord knows, you’d never hear something like that out of Dallas, even if Jesus Christ himself was the second-string QB. (Not that Jesus would ever deign to play for the ladies up north. Maybe I should have used “Troy Aikman’s assbaby” as my hypothetical QB. Whatever.)
ANYWAY…like I said, that is a pretty enlightened statement for a GM to make. Do I buy it? Depends. If you are asking whether I believe that Sage would get to play if Schaub flopped, of course. If, however, you are asking whether I think Schaub and Sage enter this season on equal footing with the starting QB job up for grabs, my answer is “hell to da naw, dawg.” Which I think means “no.”
Without rehashing all the same Schaub v. Sage arguments, can we all just agree that pretending like the QB you mortgaged the farm for this time last year is going to be given every chance in the world to succeed is asinine? Better yet, can we agree that if Sage and Schaub turn in identical pre-season performances that Schaub is the guy you go with? Finally, can we assume that I am just doing a paragraph of nothing but rhetorical questions so it looks like I have posted more?
Matt Millen might have been an upgrade
Jul 7, 2007 Casserly blows goats... I have proof, Money Money Money, Preview, Tank Johnson's gunrack
There are three things that I am obsessive-compulsive about–making my lawn perfect, bar-b-queing, and writing about football. I point this out for two reasons: first, I have been doing the second of those things today, which is why I haven’t posted, and, second, it appears that former GM Charlie Casserly was in no way obsessive about anything related to his position.
You see, to be truly OCD about anything, you have to be able to devote a singular intensity to it, so that nothing else matters while you are working. I can stand and stare at the thermometer on a smoker for 8 to 10 hours at a stretch–I’ve done that today, in fact, starting at 6:30AM. Casserly, apparently, couldn’t make it through a single contract negotiation without losing focus (and possibly taking total leave of his senses) and he damn sure could not devote the focus needed to build a cap-friendly, successful team.
Why do I say that?
See, e.g., here. (Hat tip to the fellas Tim at BRB.) As of right now, the Texans have approximately $30.5 MM locked up in dead money (i.e. money paid to players who will not suit up for the Texans this season).
Such luminaries as Gary Walker, Zach Weigert, and Seth Payne grace that list. Plus, you have the always-fun situation of paying Robaire Smith to play for Tennessee and Cleveland. Great.
Now, there are some glimmers of a silver lining to this situation. For one, at least according to the author of the article, it was precipitated by the regime change from Shitard-Fucktard1 to Smith-Kubiak and from the switch from a 3-4 to a 4-3 defense. If last season is any barometer2, both of those changes were for the better. Certainly the coaching change was an improvement–Capers reliably demonstrated that he couldn’t manage a whore house on a troop train. Moreover, the defensive shift certainly allowed DeJesus Ryans the freedom to roam without worrying about too many 300-lb blockers. Both of those things have to be worth a certain amount of money down the road.
Second, the salary cap this season is $109 MM. On top of that, we currently have $3.35 MM in “forward cap adjustment”3, meaning we have cap space of around $7.2 MM dollars to spend between now and kickoff 2007. Translation: We aren’t exactly scraping and begging for cap room just to field a team. Sure, we’d like to have more room–every team would–but we are sitting more or less fine at the moment. Besides, the author of the above article draws the line for “problematic” dead money at $10 MM, which is a threshold that 2006 playoff participant New Orleans crosses (as do a number of other teams with first- or second-year head coaches).
Finally, and most fantastically orgasmic, next year’s projection only has us on the hook for about $2.93 MM, with cap space of over $37 MM. Obviously, that is an estimate, but it is a FAR better number to look at than many teams have right now.
Now, please, PLEASE, don’t get me wrong. None of this absolves Casserly of the shit-poor job he did over the past few years. Signing someone like Gary Walker to a contract that would have you on the hook for $5.5 MM even if he played this season is asinine. At best. And paying Robaire Smith to play for a friggin’ division rival last season smacks of incompetence of the highest order. Casserly was to Scott Pioli as Corky Thatcher was to Stephen Hawking.
Still, you almost have to consider us lucky that we can be in year two of a new regime and still have over $7 MM in cap space to spare, especially with the core that we have. Right now (other than 75% of a secondary) what do we really need? A veteran WR2? Sure. But that’s enough money to sign any one that might come available to a one year sheet. Honestly, that’s even more than enough to sign, say, Keenan McCardell and Tank Johnson.
At this point, I don’t know how much more we could ask for.
(You know, other than a real CB2.)
1 Also known as “Casserly-Capers.”
2 Three straight sentences with a meteorological bent. I’ll stop. Maybe.
3 Quickly, if a team defined an incentive as “likely to be earned” (based upon language in the CBA) in a player’s contract in 2006, that incentive would have counted against last year’s cap. However, if the player never actually achieved the required goal to trigger the incentive, then a portion of that incentive counts as a credit against this year’s cap. It’s not a great reflection on your prior season is people fail to reach “likely” incentives, but it sure helps this year. C’est la vie.
