Tyler Dragon - Bengals may have found their IOL

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

(12-23-2020, 10:38 AM)Sled21 Wrote: Everybody keeps saying sign Thuney, like it is a given he will even be available. And if he is, 30 other teams will be after him as well. I'd love to snag him, but they better be looking elsewhere as well.

Certainly won't be 30 other teams after him. The real key here is the salary cap reduction for 2021. It has been going up ~$10m/yr, and yet this offseason it's projected to go DOWN ~$23m. 

As it stands right now, there's already 10 teams in negative cap space for 2021 and another 4 with $1-10m in cap space. That's with only about 40 players under contract each, on average. So not even a full roster.

There's going to be a pretty decent sized purge of players from teams this offseason as teams get under the cap, and only about 1/3rd of the NFL teams will have the cap space to sign the bigger FAs. The Bengals are among that 1/3rd. They're 6th in cap space for 2021 and that's not even counting no-brainer cuts like Bobby Hart ($5.9m saved), CJ Uzomah ($5.3m saved) and others.

(12-23-2020, 10:42 AM)bengalfan74 Wrote: Agree

But I'd add Hart and Price to the need to be gone list. Perhaps keep Hart as a backup ?

I think you have to get rid of Hart to make space for FA OL. Cutting Hart saves $5.9m in cap space.

Honestly I forgot Price was even a thing, hence his exclusion. Looked it up and while his savings is less, they still save $2.1m in cap space cutting him, too.

So there you go. Hart and Price gone and it saves $8m, that's a good chunk of what it'll cost to sign at least 1 FA OL already covered.