@Bike 340900 wrote:

Well, let’s take a look at those six players I mentioned to reduce our cap by 49 mil:

Revis – his play was embarrassing vs Tennessee. Let him go.

Agreed. No questions. I never viewed him as anything but a very cheap mid-season “quick fix”. By overthecap.com that saves us $4.5 million.

@Bike 340900 wrote:

Ford – oft injured, never did pan out like we had hoped – zero payout of dead cap money. Let him go.

Mostly agree. But we still need some sort of pass rush from the right. Without help from the right Houston will be double teamed on the left and be fairly ineffective. With our shortage of draft picks it’s not going to be easy to replace him in the draft so we’d probably have to bring in an aging veteran on a 1 year contract. Call that maybe $5 million. So net savings of about $3.7 million

@Bike 340900 wrote:

Hali – end of great career. Oft injured. Let him go.

Excuse me if I shed a tear or two. But you are correct. I expect he is going to retire. And I’ll be happy if that happens. I’d be very sad if we cut him. But yes, we’ve seen him play his last year as a Chief. Savings $8 million. The bad part here is we’ve just lost 2 OLBs on the right side, so as mentioned above that is a hole we will have to plug. Do we have a competent “next man up” to fill this slot? Hence my comment above about having to use some of the cash we save on Ford to pick up an aging veteran on a 1 year deal.

@Bike 340900 wrote:

Bailey – part of the worst DL in the NFL vs the run. Replaceable via trade or FA. Let him go.

Agreed. He’s worth more to us as cap space than he is as a player. Savings $6 million.

@Bike 340900 wrote:

DJ – still playing well, team leader, great player, but getting up there in age and speed. Restructure to a cap-friendly contract, or trade/release.

With Tamba gone, I think losing DJ would be a terrible mistake unless someone wanted to give up some SERIOUS draft picks for him. So I would be 100% against an outright release. I also *think* nobody is going to give us as much draft pick value as I believe he is worth to us as a leader and a player. So IMO the way to go here is restructure. He is currently looking at a $10.25 million payday for 2018 (but only $2.25 million of that is guaranteed) and then becoming a free agent who won’t get another long term contract from anyone. He surely knows he is slowing down. Not in desire, but in ability. So we add another year to his contract, bump his guaranteed money by $3-$5 million. In short, he plays next year and maybe the year after, we increase his cost a bit, but we divide it over 2 years so we get cap savings for 2018 of maybe $3-5 million, he gets an extra guaranteed $3-$5 million and we get his rights for 2 more years instead of 1. In short, a classic example “putting off until tomorrow a decision we really don’t want to make today”. Usually not a good idea, but in this case with with how strapped we are for cap cash and how short we are of draft picks I think it a good decision.

@Bike 340900 wrote:

Parker – decent safety but replaceable via FA/draft/trade. Restructure to a cap-friendly contract, or trade/release.

I think he is worth the $7 million he is scheduled to make in 2018. He is also going to be 31 in 2018 so the “age thing” is catching up with him. He’s also under contract through 2019 for basically the same money (only $500K more). And we’d save $1.5 million extra by cutting him in 2019 rather than 2018. So while I don’t strongly object to losing Parker, I question whether 2018 is the year to do it.

@Bike 340900 wrote:

There’s your 49 mil cap reduction and AS11 stays.

Of course, its not a REAL $49 million in cap savings. These cap savings are “gross” not “net”. IMO we’d create a lot of holes by taking all of these moves in 2018 and with a depleted draft we’d have a very difficult time filling those holes with cheap rookies. So we would likely have to spend a fair part of that $49 million on free agents to plug all the holes we had created. So I think realistically our REAL SAVINGS would be closer to $25-$30 million once we plugged the holes we created. That is certainly enough to keep Alex.

In short Bike, it’s not any of your individual suggestions that I have a problem with…it’s making all of them AT ONCE. Your whole suggestion pretty much blows up our entire Defense and that scares the crap out of me with us having so few draft picks.

Please be CLEAR….I’d LOVE for us to find a way to keep Alex for 2018. I REALLY, REALLY like Alex.

But since we are playing in the land of “Alice In Wonderland”, let’s really go down the rabbit hole and eat or drink whatever it is that makes the rabbit crazy as hell…..

We all know that Reid likes to have an EXPERIENCED QB to back up his starter. And Reid doesn’t seem to mind paying that backup a good bit more than the average backup makes. Alex currently has $3.6 million he is guaranteed to make from the Chiefs in 2018. If nobody is willing to pay us a lot of draft picks for Alex, then why not see if we can renegotiate his contract? Here’s what is floating around in my head….extend Alex’s contract to 4 years–so 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. Increase his guaranteed money to $15-$20 million (all in the form of pro-rated bonus). Promise Alex a REAL chance to compete for the starter job in 2018. So Alex’s yearly pro-rated bonus would be about $4 million. So that is a guaranteed $16 million. Make his salary (not guaranteed) $1 million per year or maybe $2 million. Add a bonus of $500k once he becomes the backup for any game he starts (injury to Mahomes) or $250K for any game where he doesn’t start but has to step in (injury to Mahomes). This is problematic because it creates a well of cap cash we have to keep available if Mahomes gets injured but maybe there is a way to handle that that smarter people than I can figure out.

I know that sounds convoluted and crazy. And it is. But it keeps Alex as a starter or as a backup, gives us an EXCELLENT backup once Mahomes becomes the starter and makes our total QB cost for the next 4 years at an average of about $12 million per year (which is dirt cheap for a combined cost for 2 excellent QBs.) Would Alex do it? I doubt it. But you never know until you ask. It would give Alex an extra $15-$20 million in guaranteed money in his bank account plus his yearly salary as long as we kept him plus any bonus money he made when he had to take the field. And it would save Alex from the indignity of getting traded to a marginal or crappy team. Essentially a “golden parachute” with a gentle landing.

Yeah I’ve gone down the rabbit hole and entered “fantasy-land”.

@matthewschiefs 340901 wrote:

I could see them letting go of any you listed outside of Ford I don’t think they would let him go.

Curiosity….why do you think letting go of Ford is such a bad idea? He’s not “bad” but he’s not exactly great either.

@jason1981 340916 wrote:

I agree but i think thats more on sutton than players. Sutton is bad at making in game adjustments. I hope we fire sutton.

Certainly this season shook my faith in Sutton. But I’m not sure it’s all Sutton’s fault. We lost Poe, we lost Ford and dear old Tamba is pretty much finished. Those 3 things created a lot of problems. I think we need to spend some serious draft capitol on our Defense–once we get some draft capitol to spend.

@matthewschiefs 340920 wrote:

This is another reason I think Alex is done in KC. We are really limited in draft capitol right now and cap capitol moving Alex would help give us more of both.

THERE IT IS. If we can get back a decent chunk of the draft capitol we traded to get Mahomes then it was an AMAZING move. If not, then we probably face 1 or 2 grim years. Same applies to cap space. To me it really comes down to….”can we turn that trade up to get Mahomes into something close to trading Alex for Mahomes?”

@matthewschiefs 340926 wrote:

It’s not that I think it’s a “bad idea” it’s just a move I don’t see them making

Gotcha. Ford is nothing special but replacing him with someone as good or better for less money isn’t going to be the easiest thing either.