Gerald McCoy

[IndyNorm]

Originally Posted by Chaka

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 why people on here are disagreeing with you. You seem to think that signing 1-2 higher tier FAs to short term, reasonable contracts with kill us cap-wise which just isn't the case. After the supposedly cap killing Houston signing we're at $55M under the cap which is $14M more than any other team, and if we had signed McCoy to a similar deal as Carolina we would still be $6M more under than any other team.

You also never take into account (maybe you're unaware) that per the CBA NFL teams have to spend a certain percentage of the salary cap within a given period of time. Did some googling on the details of this and the short version is that teams have to spend at least 89% of their base salary cap between '17-'20 in total cash on players. To be compliant with this the Colts have to spend an additional ~$64M between now and the end of the '20 season, so we can't just simply horde cap space until '21 or '22 as you suggest.

Another thing to bear in mind is that the current CBA ends after the 2020 season, so the rules on rolling cap space YoY could change. If I was in the NFLPA I would certainly push for that in an attempt to increase current player salaries.