Gerald McCoy

[Chaka]

Originally Posted by Luck4Reich

I dont understand how the cap works and will not claim to. What I want explained is what good does let's say 40 million in cap sitting there during the season do us if we come up short at winning (playoffs, AFC title game, SB )?

If this happens and this team yet again fails to get more pressure on QBs... and we will face better this year.

If the up and coming guys dont progress and the Colts are a bottom half team at pressuring the QB. Let's say McCoy gets 8 or 9 sacks for the Panthers.

Would it have hurt to sign him to a one year? Saying he isnt a fit when he is an upgrade makes no sense to me.

Again I dont claim to understand the cap and certainly the positions as much as others here.

Simply put, the cap is the maximum a team can spend on players in a given year. However, the NFL’s cap has several features that allows teams to manipulate it to fit their needs and strategy. One of those features pertinent to this discussion is the ability to roll unused cap space forward into future years. This feature is absolutely central to Ballard’s strategy.

Ballard’s master plan, as he’s stated repeatedly, is to build a core of homegrown players that can serve as the long-term nucleus of a Colt dynasty. This strategy relies upon drafting well, and then keeping the players that you’ve drafted into second and even third contracts.

Ballard appears to have drafted well, and seems to have several of his planned core players already in place (Luck, Nelson, Kelly, Leonard, etc.). With the exception of Luck, most of these guys are on their rookie contracts, and are thus being paid well under their market value. To keep this core together long term, Ballard knows that he will eventually need to pay these guys full market value when their rookie contracts expire. However, the cap provides an upper limit of how many of these guys you can pay in a given season, which for many teams would mean they’ll have to let a few of these guys go.

Ballard doesn’t want to do that, so rather than blowing his available cap space now on older luxury players like McCoy, Suh, etc., he’s conserving his cap space to push it forward so he’ll have extra money available to pay the Nelsons and Leonards of the world when they can become free agents. This will allow him to keep the core together and to outspend other teams in later years when that cap space will be desperately needed. It also serves the duel purpose of fostering a competitive atmosphere among the existing younger players, who know that if they perform they can earn a starting spot because they aren’t blocked by one-year veteran rentals.

This is a long term plan, and it takes courage to implement because the strategy creates irritation among the fan base, as it seems to have done here, because it seems frustrating to leave giant chunks of cap space unspent and to miss but on the opportunity to “upgrade” with big name veteran free agents. But as history has shown, those type of upgrades are expensive and rarely play to the level expected (recall that Ballard has repeatedly called free agency “fool’s gold”).

So, to answer your question (at last!), it's not only a question of signing McCoy vs. playing the incumbent, but rather a question of signing McCoy now at the risk of not having all the funds necessary to keep one of the Colts free agents in 2021 or 2022.