Getting hung up on the $7.5M is a classic case of sunk cost fallacy. Unless you can invent a time machine and go back and prevent the Pats from signing Cannon to that contract in the first place, $7.5M is a meaningless, irrelevant number to this discussion. It means nothing, because almost 40% of it has already been paid out and is on next year's cap regardless of what choice the Pats make. Getting hung up on loss aversion is one of the surest ways there is to consistently make the wrong choice.
Thats the wrong way to look at. At the start of the deal the Patriots & Cannon structured it as such so most of his $, dead cap & cap space were at the front of the the deal. The did that because they believed that was the least likely portion of the contract in which they would receive value consistent with the $, dead cap and cap space. You can argue the dead cap placeholder is how they were able to squeeze the signing bonus in that particular year but whatever. Now they aren't and it needs adjusting. Same as Dola, Allen and other players who too haircuts to say here.
And if you think every GM in the league--including Belichick--doesn't account for cost and risk associated with replacing a player with an unproven commodity, then I've gotta strongly disagree there too. If Belichick cuts Cannon, it will by definition (because he's a more or less rational actor) have nothing to do with his $7.5M cap hit, and everything to do with the $4.75M saved by cutting him. Belichick will have implicitly determined that, even after factoring in replacement risk, Cannon's production is worth less than $4.75M worth of cap space.
I dont. Not sure where you are getting that.
