I’ve put together a few tweets from various Denver Broncos beat reporters who talked to John Elway during an NFL combine presser about the team’s approach to the offseason. They are after the jump and have comments from me about what they really mean.
Continue reading Twitter Roundup: John Elway Talks Offseason Priorities
With Ian Rapoport reporting that the Broncos are working aggressively to get a long-term contract completed for Von Miller, I wanted to examine what this would mean in terms of how the Broncos manage their 2016 cap situation.
The short answer is that, by signing Miller to an extension now, the Broncos can reduce his cap charge for this year by putting more of his first-year salary into a signing bonus, whereas by using the tag on him, they can put more of his first-year salary into the space committed to the tag and keep his signing bonus low.
While keeping a player’s signing bonus as low as possible is ideal for ensuring any dead money hits for cutting a player early are minimal, sometimes you’re OK with giving the player a larger signing bonus if he has proven he is worth committing to for the long term.
Continue reading Why Extending Von Miller Now Makes Sense
It’s good to see a lengthier piece on this phenomenon.
But as the NFL gathers in Indianapolis for the annual scouting combine, head coaches and general managers don’t expect the draft to be a quick fix for any teams looking to improve their offensive line.
Most of the best college offensive linemen, including multiple players who will be drafted in the first round, are considered NFL projects.
The college game now is just too different, NFL executives said, and players are entering the league with so much to learn.
Continue reading Lindsay Jones Investigates The Struggle Of Young Offensive Linemen
I don’t really have a lot more to write about NFL free agency, but thought it might be a fun exercise to predict where some of the top free agents could be headed.
I pulled Walter Football’s list of top 90 free agents, sorted out the players who will or are likely getting a franchise tag, removed the restricted free agents (because most likely will get high tenders from their current teams) then looked at a few other names and projected where I think they will be headed.
Walter Football’s rankings, of course, are just one site’s opinion, so I stuck with the players I imagine most everyone would agree are the best of the free agents out there. Either way, this is just something I’m doing for kicks. This is by no means a complete list of free agents and those I list as getting the franchise tag isn’t the full list of that, either
Continue reading Free Agent, Free Agent, Who’s Got The Free Agent
I’m not one to give in to speculation about future draft picks. It’s arbitrary and very rarely are predictions correct outside of the first 10 draft picks. Instead of yet another article on a whim about future draft picks, what if I were to grade the players from the previous one?
There is so much good stuff in this article, but it’s important to highlight the key factor that led Mathis from Philadelphia to Denver. As Mathis said to Klis:
There were many things that Chip had done that showed me he wasn’t building a championship team. Two of the main issues that concerned me were: 1. A never-evolving, vanilla offense that forced our own defense to play higher than normal play counts. 2. His impatience with certain personality types even when they were blue-chip talents. The Broncos team I was on would have eaten Chip alive. I don’t think he could have handled the plethora of large personalities.
The first point should be a strong point against Kelly being some revolutionary genius. But the second point is more important, and it’s is a trap that so many coaches coming from college fall into. It’s easy enough to run over college-aged personalities, but players in the NFL have been through that gauntlet before, and aren’t interested in getting run over again after that experience.
I also have to highlight how he demanded to leave Philly, in a way that is a prime example of Mathis’s humor:
Most players would use their agent to handle such a task. Mathis directly texted Kelly with a YouTube video of Engelbert Humperdink singing, “Please release me, let me go. …
Given the injuries that he was going through, I would have preferred “I’ll hold the pain, release me“, but if the goal was maximum annoyance of Kelly, pure 1980s ballads are the way to go.
This will be primarily a devil’s advocate post. I still strongly believe that it’s in the best interest of the Broncos to secure a contract extension with Von Miller right now to take advantage of gaining 2016 cap space. However, I’m resigned to the fact that this likely won’t happen, and the more likely scenario is for this to follow the same arc as Ryan Clady and Demaryius Thomas: place a franchise tender on Miller now, with an extension ultimately coming before the July 15 deadline.
However, I’m going to explore what benefits there may be to letting Miller play out the 2016 season on the franchise tag.
Continue reading A Counterpoint On The Von Miller Contract Negotiations