05-01-2022, 09:57 AM
(04-30-2022, 01:18 PM)grampahol Wrote: See Pittsburgh? You should have sucked big time two years earlier instead of pretending Ben was going to ride off into the sunset with a gimme superbowl win.. At least Bengals fans didn't have to worry about it. We knew Andy wasn't the answer and we WERE gonna suck no questions asked. The timing couldn't have been better..
It's a little bit more detailed than wishing that Ben was going to ride off into the sunset.
They gave him one last big contract because they truly felt like he could still play at a very high level and lead them to a championship.
And they weren't wrong when he signed the contract. He probably could have. The year before he had statistically his best season, leading the league in passing. But immediately after he signed it is when he snapped the elbow. That was the absolute worst possible time from a cap management standpoint.
Because of the way dead money is calculated and handled when you are trading/releasing/retiring a player, if they had done that the next season, the cap implications would have been catastrophic. They were stuck with him This is what I've been most critical of the Browns about with Watsons fully guaranteed contract. If he suffers a severe injury very early on, they're screwed. Like, they won't be able to field a team, screwed. And typically that dead money burden lessen quickly, but in Watsons case, it will significantly linger through the duration of the contract.
Back to Ben. I think they felt like and were hoping that he could make a full recovery in 2020 after the surgery. But when it was obvious that he was shot, because of the cap implications, they really had no choice but to renegotiate and extend his contract, and bring him back in 2021. They probably didn't want to, but they were trapped.
