I fail to understand some of you fans. When the club doesn't have cap room long term, it conserves money and cap room. Why? SO IT CAN USE IT, when it does have the cap under control. Look at the Colvin signing, and the Law negotiations.
Belichick can pay Graham, Samuels and TBC, a million dollars a year MORE per season each, than the franchise price for each player, and still have mega cap room.
Why won't they remain here?
Asante and Grahambo in particular is a real producer, and BB pays for genuine production. Ask Jarvis Green.
Asante Samuel is becoming a very good CB and a play maker, at a position that BB covets and respects.
TBC has had the investment of four years of training in converting to OLB from college rush end. He had the pass rush; his sack totals are fine. he has controlled the edge. The anti-run statistics are fine. He hasn't yet come around on pass defense but as I recall Willie didn't do much there either.
It's not just about money, it's about competition for their services.
The problem is that with the exception of exercising the franchise tag, we now have no more rights to those players than any other team.
With 31 other teams potentially bidding, the a priori probability of retaining any one of them is 1/32. That's only a 10% a priori probability of retaining even
one of the three. The odds are improved because not every team is in the market for every player, but every team will consider making an offer to every free agent that can improve their team.
The "hometown discount" can certainly be a factor, as for many players there's value in avoiding the disruption of moving, preserving their relationships with teammates and/or coaches, and staying with a winning franchise. Every free agent ends up having to quantify those effects; they're generally positive but sometimes negative.
There's the "contract year" effect, with players not as likely to risk killing themselves once they've finally scored a big contract, but that's team neutral: it's a risk every team takes with free agents.
The only other countervailing factor is that other teams
should bid less for the services of our good free agents than the Patriot's do, because it's difficult to separate their performance from the Patriot's system. This is a significant factor, as most free agent's performance regresses to the NFL mean when they change teams. There are lots of free agent disappointments.
Another variant of this observation is that the Patriot's should consider overpaying market value to retain players because of the system risk that their departure will destabilize the team. Branch and Givens leaving seems to have had more negative impact than than the market value of the players would indicate.
But this is not a statistical exercise, the Patriots and all other teams evaluate prospective players by breaking down film and attempting to isolate out individual contribution by factoring out team system contribution. There will always be teams that value our players as much or more than we do.
Finally, some teams overpay their free agents for public relation reasons, i.e. to avoid provoking media problems and angering their fan base. For an insecure GM/Coach or ownership, this can be a significant factor. However, I think Belichick couldn't care less about this effect.
So we'll be lucky to sign even one of these guys. They're not ours anymore. Our best chance is probably Graham, because he already got decent money with his 1st round contract, has had chronic injury problems, and isn't flashy. The increase he is offered may not be worth moving for,
provided he likes it here. TBC may find the magnitude of his offers disappointing, but someone is going to offer him a huge increase over his 7th round deal. And Samuel has to be salivating at the huge pay day he's going to get from someone.
Let's also not forget Junior Seau, who has indicated he will play again next year somewhere. He was really coming on in our system. But free agent calculus applies to him as well.
I'm not optimistic about retaining these guys. We'll be doing well to keep one; two would be great.
