06-02-2017, 03:39 PM
(06-02-2017, 02:45 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: An Eifert deal right now makes 0 financial sense. He can't stay healthy and is only making $4.8m in 2017. If he stays healthy for once and does what we know he can do, why would you give him $9-11m/yr (and risk him getting hurt again) when you can franchise tag him (it was $9.8m for this year) and then franchise tag him again.
So you could either... have him play year-by-year and essentially have him on a $4.8m/$~10m/$12m "three year deal" where you can bail out any year. Or you could extend him and pray you don't waste a ton of money when he gets hurt again.
One of those two makes a lot more sense. You can have him for his age 27, 28, and 29 years for essentially $26.8m, which is a lot cheaper than any contract he will be willing to sign right now, while also retaining the ability to not pay him in 2018 if he gets hurt again in 2017, or not pay in 2019 if he gets hurt in 2018. Then he'll turn 30 and hit FA.
So couple issues, one your basing your tag number on this past year expect it to be about 10% higher next year. The other issue is that second year tag will make him far and away the highest TE in the league, what if thats the year he gets hurt again? The smart thing is to structure it incentive based with a decent base salary. Sign him to 4 years with a 6.5 million a year base (putting him around 15th in league), with games played incentives allowing him to be a top 3 TE. Base it that way for the first two years with a decent signing bonus and an out after year 3 in case he does end up hurt again. This gives him motivation to sign and gives us good value if he misses time or it means we have one of the top TE in the game and he is paid like it.
If we go the tag route all your doing is rolling the dice every year while paying him as the top TE in the game. Also understand going for the multi year deal, we can stretch the cap number making it a lot lower as we go where as each year we tag him we eat the full cap number which hurt the rest of our roster.
