Comments on: A Prison Without Walls

By: David

David — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:38:27 +0000

Ian:1) That isn’t actually automatically true. Some of what the Redskins do is guarantee previously unguaranteed money. You can do this when your owner isn’t a cheapskate (and sadly when your owner charges a billion dollars for parking). But yes, my point was that this is my fear. If we renegotiate with Cornelius Griffin we are putting off his cap hit and making it bigger so that when he is no longer useful it will be worse. 2) Again, my point. We have a real slate of draft picks this year and other than the now dead Chad Johnson trade have made no efforts to trade them away. 3) We wouldn’t have lost out on Taylor. Had Taylor never been shot we obviously would have offered him a huge contract, but it would have been mostly in prorated signing and roster bonuses. It is easy to keep a cap number low at the beginning of a new contract. And even if this wasn’t possible, we would have maybe lost out on Lance Briggs or whoever we would have gone after in free agnecy this year, but Sean Taylor was obviously a Redskins for life. 4) Yup, we have. But think about it this way. The first years of the Snyder era we grabbed guys like Bruce Smith and Deion Sanders who sucked even when got them. We moved towards a policy where with some exceptions (like Adam Archuleta) we were getting good free agents like London Fletcher, Andre Carter, Shawn Springs, and Cornelius Griffin. The error was in the trades and the resticted free agent signings. But at the time I can see how they made sense. It was an attempt to get young players in their prime instead of the retreads we had just gone through. Last year, the Skins filled specific holes in free agency– CB depth (Smoot, Macklin, etc), middle linebacker (Fletcher), and otherwise used the draft (Laron Landry) to fill any other holes. In other words, the change is already happening and you just missed it. You can argue against Cerrato or Zorn being appointed to their positions, but there is no way you can argue we haven’t adopted the right plan recently when it comes to the draft and free agency. We’ve learned the lesson you think we haven’t learned.-DW

By: gehenna

gehenna — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:14:45 +0000

I can understand how any team that has less than 20 million of the salary cap wide open must seem crazy and foolish to an Eagles fan. We have signed some bad players in free agency but we’ve become more disciplined recently. Unlike the eagles, we’re actually learning from our mistakes and not doggedly commiting the same mistakes over and over and over again.

By: Nfl » A Prison Without Walls

Nfl » A Prison Without Walls — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:36:17 +0000

[...] Riggo’s Rag | A Washington Redskins Blog wrote an interesting post today on A Prison Without WallsHere’s a quick excerptA Prison Without Walls You know that mime schtick where they pretend their trapped in a shrinking box? That’s what the press claims cap jail is like. And most people are talking about the Skins as a team in cap prison. It is true that we started this offseason 20 million over the cap, but we have already started to trim that just by monkeying with contracts. For instance, we took four million off the cap by converting some of Randy Thomas’s contract into bonuses. Anyway, despite being over [...]