Q: When you have to cut a younger guy, is it just a guessing game if he'll make it through waivers if he's someone you want to sign to your practice squad?
BB: It's a guesstimate. It would be a guesstimate. I think that's part of the overall decision-making process. If you think that you need to carry a player to have him or would he be claimed and how much interest is there in that player, you don't know. It only takes one team to claim him. 30 teams could not want him and one team could and that answers your question. It's a very inexact science. I think in the end, you have to do what's best for your football team. Now sometimes there's a little strategy involved in personnel moves, kind of like there is in the draft. Sometimes you can maneuver a little bit if you want to do a little bit of a draft strategy on who might be available, who might slide, who might not, that type of thing. I think there's a little bit of that, but I think in the end, the best decision is to make decisions that we feel are best for our football team. I would say that 95 percent of it is probably that and then there might be a little percentage of trying to figure out what's going to happen. But I've seen it go the other way too. I've seen other teams call about a certain player and you think you're going to be able to trade this player or trade this player and, okay, it doesn't work out and then you release him and then nobody claims him. You say, 'Well I know this guy is gone because these two or three teams have called and even thought about trading for him,' and then you release him and they don't pick him up. This time of year there's a lot of things in flux. There really are. A team could be interested in a player, but then somebody else becomes available and then they're not interested in that guy anymore and vice versa. A lot can change in a hurry and everybody has injuries, everybody has particular situations on their roster by certain positions. Everybody has young players who are ascending but haven't caught the veteran players yet, maybe veteran players who maybe aren't what they were the year before, but they're still better. When do you make the switch, when do you not make it? How many young players is too many? How many veteran players is too many? How do you balance that? Where are you now in September? Where do you think you're going to be in the middle of October? Where do think you're going to be in November relative to some of those decisions? Is the young guy going to improve, where is he going to be one month from now, two months from now? Maybe he's not ready now, but where do you think he's going to end up? The flipside of that is sometimes it's the older players - where do you think they're going to be halfway or three quarters of the way through the season. Again, I can't sit here and say there's a formula. You just try to take everything into consideration and make the best decisions you can for the football team. Each year is different. Every player is different. Every situation is different. I don't think there's any formula or perfect example of, 'If you put these things in and you come out with this.' I just don't think it works that way.
