Wickersham Strikes: Belichick talked to Giants/Dolphins/Washington about coaching there in Brady standoff

[libra957]

Tom did once said he wasn't gonna make it easy for Bill to get rid of him.

 

[Hammer of Thor]

When all is said and done, as difficult as it was to accept, letting Brady walk was the best thing for this football team.
Had he stayed there was no cap room to improve the 2019 team, so 2020 would not have been a team able to compete for a championship. This year he would be taking up 25 mill and last years 25 mill would have reduced the carry forward so our 60 mill in cap room would have been 10 mill and we would be patching and plugging an insufficient roster with few resources to do so while rebuilding with a 43 year old qb.
It was time to pay the overdue bills and start fresh because keeping Brady would have resulted in him leading further degraded teams from 2019 forward
We would not have won a championship in his career span.
Him moving on ultimately will be looked at as the best thing for all parties.
Now we need to move up and draft a damn QB

This should be read carefully and fully.

People have to accept the fact that a team is either competing for a Lombardi or they are not. "Keeping Brady" is useless.

This isn't necessarily true. They could have structured things so that Brady would still be here and the team would look like it is now. What if they re-signed him in 2020 but took the Tampa Bay approach? His initial contract in 2020 had no signing bonus, just $15M in guaranteed salary and $10M in roster bonus for 2021. That's a $25M cap charge. However:

- Brady's 2020 dead money hit gets reduced by $6.75M due to the re-signing.
- Pats decide not to franchise Joe Thuney and he walks. That's $14,781,000 in savings they don't pay (they pick up a 2021 comp pick for him in the 3rd round, replacing the Brady 2021 comp pick but probably a few spots lower than Brady's 96).
- Pats don't sign Cam, who counted $1,662,500 against the 2020 cap.

All told, that's a net $1,806,500 in extra 2020 cap space used, that impacts the 2021 carry over. But the team is weak; they certainly don't win a Super Bowl. Worst case, having Brady but losing Thuney keeps the team at 7-9, best case they make the playoffs as a wild card and get knocked out early like in 2019.

Moving on to 2021, in addition to that $1,806,500 carry forward reduction, they also have to take the $6.75M in remaining old Brady bonus charge. So they're $8,556,500 in the hole. However....

- Cam hit several incentives that were NLTBE for 2020 cap purposes that negatively impact the 2021 carry forward. OTC says his actual cash was $5,750,000 during 2020 which means that the $4,087,500 difference doesn't hit the 2021 cap carry forward (unlike now where it does).
- And they don't sign Cam for 2021 with his $5,423,529 cap charge when including 2021 LTBE incentives

Now that $8,556,500 deficit has become a $954,529 positive. But of course this doesn't account for Brady yet. Again, let's follow Tampa's lead and renegotiate -- $40M signing bonus, 5 year deal with 3 void years after 2022, $1.75M base salary this year plus incentives. OTC says that creates a $10,545,588 cap charge.

Net, the team has now spent $9,591,059 more in 2021 than they currently are. Miguel has the team with ~$15,582,000 in cap space now so it all fits, but it's close. But they have the same exact roster as currently, plus Brady. If we had Brady as the team's QB right now after our off-season, this board would be talking Super Bowl at this point and how they can knock off the Chiefs in the AFC this year.

So the Patriots could have fit Brady into the salary cap structure and have the same exact 2021 team otherwise and be in position to win. Now, should they have? That's a different question -- it's definitely true that the team would have a ton of deferred money they'd need to deal with in 2023. And maybe Gronk unretires in 2020 for the Patriots which throws a monkey wrench into this. And of course maybe Brady isn't willing to wait through 2020 to get this 2021 team, and therefore would have left regardless. But this is what Deus is talking about when he says the team didn't have to take the cap hits last year. They really didn't. They could have waited until 2023, or kicked it further until Brady sucked. It would have come due at some point, but it didn't have to be 2020 -- the Patriots decided it would be 2020 when they decided not to re-sign Brady.

 

[Ice_Ice_Brady]

Thuney was franchise tagged, he costs the Patriots zero dollars in 2021... his signing is irrelevant considering they needed a starting guard in 2020 and they hoped to keep him. DMC is an important player on the defense and one they wanted to retain going forward to QB the defense. Brady cost 50 million guaranteed, not 25.

And signing Brady before the deadline would not "reduce" his cap hit, it would have allowed them to spread it out over the remainder of a new contract. It doesn't mean new money added to his existing cap hit wouldn't accumulate further.

Consider last year's 15th round pick Jerry Jeudy signed a 4 year, $15,192,974 contract with the Broncos, including a $8,609,436 signing bonus = $15,192,974 guaranteed.

Now pretend for a moment BB drafts Mac Jones or Trey Lance at fifteen...

Year one: $9.2 million - 2.76 million cap hit
Year two: $1.3 million - 3.45 million cap hit
Year three:$2.0 million - 4.14 million cap hit
Year four: $2.7 million - 4.83 million cap hit

Vs Tom Brady's Tampa contract, plus the cap we already owed for him... a 63.5 million dollar cap hit spread out over two years:

Year one: $25 million - 31.75 million cap hit
Year two: $25 million - 31.75 million cap hit

Even if you spread it out and add a phantom third year:

Year one: $25 million - 21.2 million cap hit
Year two: $25 million - 21.2 million cap hit
Year three:$0.0 million - 21.2 million dead cap hit

Now tell me where all the veteran weapons that Tom wanted are coming from, especially in 2020 when they were flat broke? Once they let DMC and Thuney walk imagine that team with all the free agent vets they did sign also gone. Tom would retire in another year or so with zero rings to show for it and the Patriots would be saddled with more cap debt than they had in 2020. The point is to win rings... not make it so Tom can retire a Patriot.

I was going to do a point-by-point here on all the ways you attempt to mislead and obsure through outright dishonest arguments, but there's no point in trying to argue with you. As usual, your head is so far up Belichick's rectum, you've detached yourself from reality. Others can wear themselves out going point-by-point with you.

I guess the Patriots were the only team in the salary cap era who, despite years of planning, were unable to afford their long-time franchise QB, despite that QB asking for about 60% of market. But I'm sure in the end they were really smart to walk away, because that's how you always spin it.

The point is to win rings... not make it so Tom can retire a Patriot.

 

[Wozzy]

I was going to do a point-by-point here on all the ways you attempt to mislead and obsure through outright dishonest arguments, but there's no point in trying to argue with you. As usual, your head is so far up Belichick's rectum, you've detached yourself from reality. Others can wear themselves out going point-by-point with you.

I guess the Patriots were the only team in the salary cap era who, despite years of planning, were unable to afford their long-time franchise QB, despite that QB asking for about 60% of market. But I'm sure in the end they were really smart to walk away, because that's how you always spin it.

The point is to win rings... not make it so Tom can retire a Patriot.

View attachment 32291

If you could go point by point you would.

I’m dishonest in my argument but you can’t say where or how.

I hated the Duke Dawson and Dominque Easley picks, panned BB for trading back instead of drafting Foster Moreau in 2019, said not trading Malcolm Butler the preseason of 2017 for a 2nd was a big mistake... or a hundred more examples I could cite... but I have my head up Bills behind because I don’t think he’s the devil for realizing re-signing Brady was a championship dead end.

How many other teams with franchise QB’s won multiple rings over a five year period and six total?

Love the pic of Tom in Tampa though, all BB had to do was re-sign Tom and surround him with the Tampa All-Star team... sounds reasonable for a broke team.

 

[Ring 6]

This isn't necessarily true. They could have structured things so that Brady would still be here and the team would look like it is now. What if they re-signed him in 2020 but took the Tampa Bay approach? His initial contract in 2020 had no signing bonus, just $15M in guaranteed salary and $10M in roster bonus for 2021. That's a $25M cap charge. However:

- Brady's 2020 dead money hit gets reduced by $6.75M due to the re-signing.
- Pats decide not to franchise Joe Thuney and he walks. That's $14,781,000 in savings they don't pay (they pick up a 2021 comp pick for him in the 3rd round, replacing the Brady 2021 comp pick but probably a few spots lower than Brady's 96).
- Pats don't sign Cam, who counted $1,662,500 against the 2020 cap.

All told, that's a net $1,806,500 in extra 2020 cap space used, that impacts the 2021 carry over. But the team is weak; they certainly don't win a Super Bowl. Worst case, having Brady but losing Thuney keeps the team at 7-9, best case they make the playoffs as a wild card and get knocked out early like in 2019.

Moving on to 2021, in addition to that $1,806,500 carry forward reduction, they also have to take the $6.75M in remaining old Brady bonus charge. So they're $8,556,500 in the hole. However....

- Cam hit several incentives that were NLTBE for 2020 cap purposes that negatively impact the 2021 carry forward. OTC says his actual cash was $5,750,000 during 2020 which means that the $4,087,500 difference doesn't hit the 2021 cap carry forward (unlike now where it does).
- And they don't sign Cam for 2021 with his $5,423,529 cap charge when including 2021 LTBE incentives

Now that $8,556,500 deficit has become a $954,529 positive. But of course this doesn't account for Brady yet. Again, let's follow Tampa's lead and renegotiate -- $40M signing bonus, 5 year deal with 3 void years after 2022, $1.75M base salary this year plus incentives. OTC says that creates a $10,545,588 cap charge.

Net, the team has now spent $9,591,059 more in 2021 than they currently are. Miguel has the team with ~$15,582,000 in cap space now so it all fits, but it's close. But they have the same exact roster as currently, plus Brady. If we had Brady as the team's QB right now after our off-season, this board would be talking Super Bowl at this point and how they can knock off the Chiefs in the AFC this year.

So the Patriots could have fit Brady into the salary cap structure and have the same exact 2021 team otherwise and be in position to win. Now, should they have? That's a different question -- it's definitely true that the team would have a ton of deferred money they'd need to deal with in 2023. And maybe Gronk unretires in 2020 for the Patriots which throws a monkey wrench into this. And of course maybe Brady isn't willing to wait through 2020 to get this 2021 team, and therefore would have left regardless. But this is what Deus is talking about when he says the team didn't have to take the cap hits last year. They really didn't. They could have waited until 2023, or kicked it further until Brady sucked. It would have come due at some point, but it didn't have to be 2020 -- the Patriots decided it would be 2020 when they decided not to re-sign Brady.

Sure you can mathematically figure a way to do anything. But what you are missing is that the cap room created last year by opt outs wasn’t there at the time brady needed to be signed. There was literally about $1.50 left after signing newton.
So you have to let thuney walk, cut other players and sign no one else to the roster carried forward from a degrading 2019 team. Why would Brady stay under those conditions.
You also are suggesting that the patriots give a 43 yo qb a 5 year contract with 40 mill amortized bonus, not something that seems to be in their DNA.
Finally we really gloss over the fact that all this would be happening with a 42 yo QB who just spent almost an entire season unable to practice because of a throwing arm injury.

 

[Ice_Ice_Brady]

If you could go point by point you would.

I’m dishonest in my argument but you can’t say where or how.

I hated the Duke Dawson and Dominque Easley picks, panned BB for trading back instead of drafting Foster Moreau in 2019, said not trading Malcolm Butler the preseason of 2017 for a 2nd was a big mistake... or a hundred more examples I could cite... but I have my head up Bills behind because I don’t think he’s the devil for realizing re-signing Brady was a championship dead end.

How many other teams with franchise QB’s won multiple rings over a five year period and six total?

Love the pic of Tom in Tampa though, all BB had to do was re-sign Tom and surround him with the Tampa All-Star team... sounds reasonable for a broke team.

Let me know when a dollar in 2020 equals a dollar in 2020, regardless of how silly that fact makes you look. Then I’d be able to actually discuss.

 

[Wozzy]

Let me know when a dollar in 2020 equals a dollar in 2020, regardless of how silly that fact makes you look. Then I’d be able to actually discuss.

If anyone knew what a dollar in 2020 equaling a dollar in 2020 meant besides yourself we could have a conversation about it... in the meantime the rest of us are thoroughly confused. Never post at happy hour is what I take from this....

 

[Biffins]

We never seem to know the duration or even the compensation for the contract that BB is on. I wouldn't dismiss it, if he contract were "up" at that time, but it seems unlikely that Kraft would ever allow his contract to get close to the end before getting a new one.

We used to think Kraft wouldn't let Brady go to his final year without extension.

 

[Biffins]

I do agree, that ended up being the right move. I've said it before but the Garoppolo thing was just a matter of bad timing. It is what it is, unfortunately.

You realize we went to 2 SBs consecutively after the Garoppolo trade. Unless you meant it was good timing,.

 

[patsfanincleveland]

We used to think Kraft wouldn't let Brady go to his final year without extension.

Thinking and you are not exactly two things that invoke immediate association.

Good effort but it looks like amfootball is the last Dummy Squad holdout on the thread.

 

[amfootball]

Sure you can mathematically figure a way to do anything. But what you are missing is that the cap room created last year by opt outs wasn’t there at the time brady needed to be signed. There was literally about $1.50 left after signing newton.
So you have to let thuney walk, cut other players and sign no one else to the roster carried forward from a degrading 2019 team. Why would Brady stay under those conditions.
You also are suggesting that the patriots give a 43 yo qb a 5 year contract with 40 mill amortized bonus, not something that seems to be in their DNA.
Finally we really gloss over the fact that all this would be happening with a 42 yo QB who just spent almost an entire season unable to practice because of a throwing arm injury.

The cap was horribly mismanaged going back 5-6 years which is what led to the putrid roster that made Brady want to leave. It was already too late by 2018/2019 to extend him, we didn't have the talent on the roster. The drafts were horrific and we did not extend anyone from the 2010s so we deteriorated to the shell we are now having to scrape the FA market on day one to get some semblance of a competitive team and of course resign awful Newton because Bill did not want to spend any draft capital or real capital on a FA QB or make a trade.

 

[The Brandon Five]

This isn't really breaking news. I remember there being similar speculation at the time that Bill was frustrated and was supposedly upset enough to explore other options and I believe I remember the Washington and Giants thing (not the Miami one). But again, it never turned into anything and well...here we are.

(UPDATE: Here was the thread on that: Tanguay: Belichick inquired about Washington job after JG trade)

At the same time, as much as we hate to admit it, Wickersham ended up being right about much of what he reported. We can talk about the things he may or may not have gotten right, but there were obviously more truths than mistruths, which I think surprised all of us.

If Bill disagreed with trading JG why did he outright laugh at the idea of trading Brady to that same team?

 

[amfootball]

If Bill disagreed with trading JG why did he outright laugh at the idea of trading Brady to that same team?

If Bill just traded Jimmy in March of 2017 like he should have when he could have gotten a haul for him from the Browns then so much of the fall out would have been avoided. Brady would have never gotten upset, we get a boat load of picks, no last second dump off to the Niners. It really was horribly mismanaged by Bill in every way possible. Brady had just won league MVP and threw for 500 yards in the SB and yet Bill for some unearthly reason thought he might decline from Feb of 2017 to Sept 2017. Unbelievable on so many levels and why Bill is taking so much heat now, deservedly so.

 

[Ring 6]

The cap was horribly mismanaged going back 5-6 years which is what led to the putrid roster that made Brady want to leave. It was already too late by 2018/2019 to extend him, we didn't have the talent on the roster. The drafts were horrific and we did not extend anyone from the 2010s so we deteriorated to the shell we are now having to scrape the FA market on day one to get some semblance of a competitive team and of course resign awful Newton because Bill did not want to spend any draft capital or real capital on a FA QB or make a trade.

i am perfectly happy with cap management that had us go to 8 straight afcc 5 SBs and win 3 of them. Please identify any organization that was run better.
Crying about one down year after that is immature.

 

[patsfanincleveland]

If Bill just traded Jimmy in March of 2017 like he should have when he could have gotten a haul for him from the Browns then so much of the fall out would have been avoided. Brady would have never gotten upset, we get a boat load of picks, no last second dump off to the Niners. It really was horribly mismanaged by Bill in every way possible. Brady had just won league MVP and threw for 500 yards in the SB and yet Bill for some unearthly reason thought he might decline from Feb of 2017 to Sept 2017. Unbelievable on so many levels and why Bill is taking so much heat now, deservedly so.

Just because some dummy posts nonsense at patsfans.com doesn't mean Belichick is "taking so much heat now".

That's just you hearing things in your head or Biffins is talking nonsense in your ear.

 

[amfootball]

i am perfectly happy with cap management that had us go to 8 straight afcc 5 SBs and win 3 of them. Please identify any organization that was run better.
Crying about one down year after that is immature.

This isn't about any of that. You don't have the roster we had in 2019 without a pretty significant build up from the previous seasons. We drafted extremely well in the early part of the 2010s which is what laid the foundation for the run from 2014-2019. We did not draft well at all from 2014-2018 which is why the roster looks the way it does now and why Kraft had to spend the most capital he ever has as owner. I am not unthankful or ungrateful for the run we had. I am just stating the facts of what happened to the roster which led to Brady's departure in 2019. A roster does not deteriorate over night.

 

[Ring 6]

This isn't about any of that. You don't have the roster we had in 2019 without a pretty significant build up from the previous seasons. We drafted extremely well in the early part of the 2010s which is what laid the foundation for the run from 2014-2019. We did not draft well at all from 2014-2018 which is why the roster looks the way it does now and why Kraft had to spend the most capital he ever has as owner. I am not unthankful or ungrateful for the run we had. I am just stating the facts of what happened to the roster which led to Brady's departure in 2019. A roster does not deteriorate over night.

We had a roster that went 12-4 in 2019.
Kraft isn’t spending any more money than any other time, this year he just spent more of it on other players.
Again, show me anyone, really ever, who did a better job.

 

[Ring 6]

If Bill disagreed with trading JG why did he outright laugh at the idea of trading Brady to that same team?

The narrative now is that the call must have happened during the season so that we can support the fake story that he wanted to trade Brady by saying he really did but maybe that happened during the season so the guy who wanted to dump Brady only laughed at being asked to trade him because in was mid season.
It’s taking a made up story and supporting it by making up hypotheticals to refute the facts that price it was made up.
kind of like politics.

 

[amfootball]

We had a roster that went 12-4 in 2019.
Kraft isn’t spending any more money than any other time, this year he just spent more of it on other players.
Again, show me anyone, really ever, who did a better job.

The roster in 2019 played one of the worst schedules the first 8 games. It went 4-5 the rest of the way when it had to play good teams which includes the first round playoff loss to the Titans. Then last year we went 7-9 so our record the last 25 games is 11-14.
Kraft has spent the most real money he ever has on the roster. By real money, I mean guaranteed money. He spent almost as much as he did when he bought the team. We had to because the roster was so bad from the poor drafting and not extending anyone from the 2010s. But perhaps the biggest blunder and the one that is going to cost us going forward is no succession plan at QB. Having Newton right now as day one starter pretty much ensures another losing season so that 11-14 record could easily become 18-24 by season's end or worse.

 

[ralmat55]

The first sentence is kind of a meandering mess, don't really understand what you're trying to say there. There's no team in the NFL that doesn't buy free agents, from 2014 on the Pats traded out, traded picks for players and went after vets vs rookies, they were trying to "win now" and vet players lend themselves to that much better than rookies do.

In regards to kicking salary cap down the road as in the Patriots "do it all the time" is wrong, the Patriots predominantly did it from 2014-2019. Prior to that it was frowned upon, they did it to extend themselves to win rings. Listen to the Peter King podcast from March 24th with Scott Pioli, he specifically says BB and he hated borrowing from future cap and wouldn't do it. So the Patriots definitely stepped outside of normal business practices to win three rings... again, something no other team had done since the Patriots last did it when Tom was being paid like a 6th round rookie.

"This is kind of the year that we've taken to adjust our cap from the spending that we've had in accumulation of prior years. We just haven't been able to have the kind of depth on our roster that we've had in some other years." - Bill Belichick to Sirius XM NFL Radio, Oct 31, 2020

This has nothing to do with blindly accepting what BB is saying, especially since Bill said this in late October and I was speaking about the cap hell the team was in months prior in the offseason when Tom was deciding what he was going to do.

Yeah the Pats could have bent over backwards to sign Tom. Tom with a worse team than last year around him is not a Super Bowl winning team. Tom with Tampa's contract as a benchmark is a 63.5 million dollar cap hit over the next two years of his deal if they signed him in 2020, even if they spread it out and kicked cap down the road his cap hit would have been massive and the team around him would have been made up of rookies and jags. Tom didn't want to play on that team and BB knew the only way to become championship relevant again anytime soon was to hit the reset button. They made the best decision for the team and for the player.

Nothing meandering at all. It was a statement of fact pointing out that you really don’t know what you’re talking about. Teams couldn’t buy championships before the salary cap because free agency and the cap came in together. There was no unrestricted free agency before the cap.

The Pats borrow from future caps all the time. Check out the 2021 cap numbers for Smith, Henry and Judon compared to the average annual value of their deals. They put 3 voidable years in D. McCourty’s deal for goodness sake.

It’s so tiring of hearing the BB cultists always blaming someone or something else for his mistakes or just unpopular decisions. Look guys the cap or the devil didn’t make Bill do it. He purposely drove Brady away. It might still prove to be the smart move although it’s not looking good now. The final chapters are still to be written.