We don't have $2.5M to spend on a QB next season. That's 5 early career players making minimum. The Jets cap situation is dire. I don't think people really understand what being 10 to 12 million under the cap really means. 2 starting LB's, 2 starting safeties, replacements at both guard spots, maybe a replacement at RT, a starting TE, another QB. The answer in the Tannenbaum days would have been to push the cap problem a bit further out by reworking several people. We're at the year when it is uncomfortable to do that because we'll be reworking to be average at best.
I know it won't be easy, but it can be done. You'd obv get hit at certain areas (LB, S) in terms of depth, but if Idzik is creative it can happen.
Fitzharvard is even worse than Sanchez, McElroy or Simms arguably the worst quarterback in the NFL not named Tebow
^^^ Makes a lot of sense to me. I also agree with 8-8. ^^^ There's really no downside. If GMAC develops, we have something. If he doesn't, we at least know what we have and what we have to do in 2014. But we are probably years away from being a contender now. We seem to have the worst possible QB luck, I swear. Checkdown Chad with the injury, then Sanchez. Years ago we draft Kenny O'Brien over Dan Marino. Bring in stop-gaps like Neil O'Donnell and Vinny T adn Favre. I mean, good God, is this ever going to end? Are we ever going to get lucky and draft Mr. Right? I was all for Joe Flacco and desperately wanted the Jets to go after him. Who knows where we'd be right now? But oh no... wait another year and draft a kid with 16 starts whose coach says is not ready yet. SOJ have the worst QB luck in the NFL.
Idk. I think 8 is a bit conservative. We won 6 last yr with the worst QB in the NFL. If we can grab someone who is around average, that can add a decent amount of wins. The problem is, who is that person?
I don't understand the love of Matt Flynn, he lost his job to a rookie that would never happen if he were any good.
We are going to lose Landry, have pretty big cap problems so we can count out signing anything besides players with extremely cheap contracts, we need 2 new gaurds, a new TE most likely, a new RB, 2 OLB's... And on top of that, we are switching to a WCO and dont really have the personnel for it. Then you add in Revis coming back from an injury and the whole contract problem and I dont see anything better than 8-8. Also, if you take a look at our schedule, its not a cake walk by any means. The only team that I would say we are better than at this point it Oakland. I think every other team we play is equal to or better than us. We have to think about the future right now. I hope Idzik has a true plan for us and follows it out. One thing this organization has truly lacked is direction. You take this year to evaluate the young talent you have and unload all your restricting contracts (a true rebuilding year). In the draft you add some young blood to the offensive side- hopefully a stud OLman and a playmaker. Try and get the right personnel for a WCO if Mornhigweg is here for the long haul. In 2014 you go out and do whatever it takes to get your franchise QB and due to the 2013 draft, he'll have a good young supporting cast around him. ... Thats what I would do.
Being creative means one of two things: either finding suckers to play for less money than they could get elsewhere or doing a lot of fudging on the cap that pushes money that would be in 2013 out to 2014 and 2015. 2013 is a real mess to sort out. 2014 is not, at least not yet. It's close to a mess but it's easy to see where really sound work this year will make next year more manageable. In a nutshell the problem with the cap this year is that the best way to loosen up the current cap is to turn salary in 2013 into a bonus that then is prorated over the life of the player's contract, only coming due in the last year of the contract or when the player leaves the Jets, which ever comes first. To get real cap savings out of that process you need players who have a high salary this year and also several years left on their contract. As an example, a player making $11 million this year with 4 years left on his contract could give the Jets more than $7.5 million in current cap savings. He'd do that by converting $10+ million of his current salary into a roster bonus, which would prorate over the 4 remaining years of the contract at $2.5 million a year. So the Jets would trade a $10 million hit on the cap this year for a $2.5 million hit each year for the next 4 seasons. On this year's cap there are 7 players making more than $5 million in salary. Two of them, Bart Scott and Calvin Pace are already being released before we get into the area of reworks. They'll provide no help in increasing that 10 to 12 million cap figure because they already helped in getting it down to that level. Another of them, D'Brickashaw Ferguson, has already done a couple of reworks for the Jets. He has a current year salary of $7.25 million and a cap figure of $10.716 million. His deal runs until 2017 though so there is a lot of time to prorate the bonus money over. Let's say he agrees to take vet minimum for the year and receive the balance of his $7.25 million salary as a bonus. D'Brick is in his 8th season in 2013. His minimum salary is $840K for the season. So he gets vet minimum salary for the year and the remaining 6.41 million is prorated from 2013 to 2017 at $1.282 million a season. He also has another $750K bonus due but I'll leave that out for now since it is included in his overall cap number and we're just going to look at old cap figure vs new cap figure. D'Brick on the old cap number was costing the Jets $10.716 million in cap space this year. Now he's costing them $5.128 million less. The Jets have gained $5.128 million in cap space on the restructure. It looks good for 2013. Here are D'Brick's cap figures for the remainder of his contract before the rework: 2013 - $10.716M 2014 - $10.417M 2015 - $10.417M 2016 - $12.825M 2017 - $13.025M The numbers are scary high but really he's not going to collect 2016 and 2017. The Jets will either rework him for a real pay cut before that and a sizeable one or they will cut him. The cap will not interfere with the cut if that's what has to happen. Here are the numbers if he's reworked in the way I described above: 2013 - $5.588M 2014 - $11.699M 2015 - $11.699M 2016 - $14.107M 2017 - $14.307M The numbers got higher and worse than that it is much harder to cut D'Brick out after 2015 than it is now because there's going to be extra money from this rework that all comes due when the cut happens. The Jets ability to manage D'Brick's bloated cap figure moving forward is substantially impacted by the rework this season. He becomes harder to deal with at the same time that the Jets are in theory looking for cap space on their competitive teams in that time frame. Ok, so whether we do the D'Brick rework or not we are now down to just 4 players that we can realistically gain chunks of cap space out of. Antonio Cromartie has just two years left on his deal including 2013 so reworking his $7 million in salary is going to give us about $3.2 million in space on the current cap. He'll be very expensive on the cap next year if we do that. His 2014 cap number is currently at $10.75 million, with almost none of it guaranteed. After a rework his cap number is going to approach $14 million next season. It's hard to see where he doesn't just become a cut in that situation, since the Jets will be able to take a cap charge of about $4.4 million to cut him but will be on the hook for a bit under $14 million if they keep him. So maybe the answer with Cromartie will be to trade him this year to get cap space. If the Jets can trade him by the date his $2.3 million roster bonus is due, that being March 16th last year, then they can realize up to $8.25 million in savings on the 2013 cap. If they have to pay the roster bonus and then deal him he is worth about $5.95 million in cap savings. David Harris has two years left on his deal and a very high salary figure which is mostly guaranteed. Santonio Holmes has three years left on his deal and a very high salary figure which is guaranteed. Mark Sanchez? A nightmare to deal with given the guaranteed money and cap space involved. if the Jets were operating in Tannenbaum mode this year they'd throw most of the problems onto future caps and have $25 million to work with for the year. They'd make 2014 and 2015 a strangling nightmare to work with. There was obviously no effective plan to deal with the possibility that the Sanchez window was going to implode the way it has. We're lucky though. We got a very smart guy to help us work things out and he has a record of having the teams that he goes to improve over time until they hit the Super Bowl. I'm hoping he'll do that for us too. Edit: as always the majority of the cap numbers I worked with in doing this came from nyjetscap.com. That's an amazing site and anybody who wants to work stuff out for themselves should check it out.
I think we can safely eliminate this as a possibility this year. Just as when we first hired Rex Ryan and the NFL thought we'd be badass and a team going places, so now are others around the league looking at us like the losing whimps that we are. And hence, you will probably have to be the highest bidder to get even the most mediocre player to come into NY. In other words, he'll want to be paid more to come to work for the losing 6-10 Jets (with multiple problems yet unresolved). In fact, we'll be lucky to replace the level of talent we're forced to jettison. I see this team as one loaded with problems and not very many near-term solutions, and for that reason, Good Luck acquiring or convincing talent that this is the place to be because this time, Honest To God, we're really "goin' to the Superbowl and we're gonna kick ass."
There's no money for high-priced free agents anyway. This year is kind of an exercise in living within our means. The new structure of football contracts, with guaranteed salaries a reality, is really going to change the way everybody does business over the next few years. The Jets are just catching the downside of it first because we guaranteed contracts as part of previous cap solutions.
Call me crazy, but I don't think we should draft a QB in the first 4 rounds this year, or bring in any QB via free agency for more than 1 year. This jets team will not be a playoff contender next year..too many holes. It's time for this franchise to stop chasing players as a "quick fix" measure. Fill holes at OL, OLB, RB, S, TE while riding things out with current WR corps in 2013. If Sanchez/McElroy/1yr fa QB can't get it done, then use 1st rd pick in 2014 for QB and 2nd rd pick for wr.
I wouldn't mind a guy like Young for a few reasons. He is a guy who would come relatively cheap, even compared to a Moore or Jackson. He is a guy that could really challenge for the starting job. He's a guy you could sign to a one year deal which would(hopefully) give him a ton of incentive to succeed. He could run the type of offense MM is known to run. I really don't see a downside to this.
He didn't lose his job to just any rookie though. He lost his job to Russell Wilson, who was one of the best quarterbacks in the league this year and took his team to the divisional round of the playoffs. I'd sign up for a quarterback that is just a little bit worse than Russell Wilson.
Would you sign up for a player that's probably as good as Ryan Fitzpatrick? Put Fitzpatrick on the Packers and he'd be a decent QB.
I was just thinking the same thing. Let's not forget What Vince young did in the beginning of his career. And he is only 29 years old and could come very cheap. My Wishlist at qb : Tavaris Jackson, Vince young, Matt Moore, or Matt flyyn
