![]() If they cut him it will still cost them over $10 Million. If Ndamukong Suh is still a Dolphin in 2018, it will cost the dolphins $26,000,000 in cap space. Bad contracts tend to lock teams into holding on to player too long due to too much guaranteed money that need to be amortized over multiple seasons for cap purposes. If your concern is under-performance, this is no concern at all. You don’t have to do any clever cap wrangling or restructuring, you can cut them if necessary and save money on the salary cap, and you have no risk other than the player leaving. One year contracts, or having a player with one year remaining on his deal, is great for any NFL team. The Packers structured this deal as such because it fits with their cap plans, not because Julius Peppers was expected, in 2016, to play up to his back-weighted contract. With many established players up for new deals next year, but not this year (Lang & Sitton for instance), this is a good time to pay someone $10 million. ![]() Moreover, the Packers have strong incentives to structure contracts in certain ways. Under Breitenbach’s theory we should apparently ignore how underpaid Peppers was on the first year of this deal. His cap hit that year was just $3.5 Million. Peppers was an absolute monster in 2014 with 7 sacks, 2 picks and 2 touchdowns, and he was disruptive in all facets of the game. When the Packers signed Julius Peppers in 2014 they agreed to pay him something like $27 Million over the life of the contract. ![]() Contracts are not structured to pay a player for what he will be worth on a year-to-year basis. Breitenbach’s point is still ridiculous for 3 major reasons. Let us for a moment give more credit to PFF’s grade than is warranted and assume that is true. He states that Peppers graded as the 27th best pass rusher among edge defenders last season (please keep in mind there are 32 NFL teams, each with 2 starting “edge defenders”) and was the 7th-highest-paid player at the position. Breitenbach seemingly has no idea of how NFL contracts work, what would constitute a bad one, and what makes an NFL defensive player valuable. The Packers could cut Peppers right now and it would barely affect them. I would argue that any NFL player with only one year left on his contract, regardless of their actual talent level, can not have one of the worst contracts in the league. Case in point, this piece by John Breitenbach claiming the Julius Peppers has one of the 5 worst contracts for any pass rusher in football. They rely so much on their own internal grading which is already highly suspect, and often apply analysis without any broader concept of what NFL teams are actually trying to do on any given play or with any given contract. Pro Football Focus may do an excellent job of charting plays and not selling the results to anyone outside of the NFL, but their analysis wing is really substandard.
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